What should you install when you've bought or built a new PC?
You'll get plenty of different answers depending on if you're asking a blue shirt, an IT pro,
or whoever the designated computer person in your family is.
Probably you. But one thing that a lot of people say by default is C Cleaner.
C Cleaner has been around since 2004 and it promises to clean all the crap off your PC.
Little known fact, the name C Cleaner is short for Crap Cleaner.
But I guess after a while the developers thought that sounded a little unprofessional.
C Cleaner became popular because it's an easy way to clear out a wide variety of unnecessary
data on your system at once. Whether it's browsing history, cached images, temporary files, or even system restore points,
C Cleaner provides one place to do it. It can also get rid of registry entries that point to nothing which, let's be honest,
they don't actually cause any problems but they're there.
Prevent programs from starting when you boot up and it even has a secure white feature to help
ensure that your deleted data can't be recovered. Although careful with that one.
Oh this sounds pretty good and more importantly it's free.
Which is probably part of the reason it's been, according to developer peer reform,
downloaded two and a half billion times.
Many by me. With five million desktop installs every week.
Oh those people can't be wrong. Could they? Well as popular as C Cleaner is, there are also plenty of people that warn against downloading
it. Even saying that it could do more harm than good. C Cleaner first started making negative headlines in 2017.
When Avast, a company that makes antivirus software, bought peer reform.
The same year, users noticed that C Cleaner would start collecting system information
ostensibly for diagnostic purposes. While this is a very common thing for programs to do,
the problem was that it would keep turning back on even after users disabled the feature,
which didn't set well with folks concerned about privacy.
But an even bigger story was that it was hacked around the same time,
resulting in over two million people with compromised installations of C Cleaner
that put spyware onto their system. A terrible look for an antivirus company whose software was supposed to clean your system.
Not open a door for data thieves. Now this was obviously a while ago.
And Avast did patch the security holes. But C Cleaner has faced other issues since then.
The program has been roundly criticized for requiring users to dig through options
if they don't want extra bundled software. You know, crap.
Ironically installed when setting up C Cleaner. Another big problem wasn't really Avast's fault,
but rather more of a result of how popular the program is.
C Cleaner is available in a pro version that has a few extra features,
like automatic driver updates, automatic cleaning of browsing data,
and ad tracker blogging. But this pro version costs money, which led some folks to try to pirate it.
And these pirated versions often contained malware.
Meaning plenty of people did end up paying dearly for their free software.
And while this is not a problem with honestly purchased copies of C Cleaner,
wasn't a great thing to happen to a company that already had egg on its face for getting hacked.
But current official versions of C Cleaner don't have the issues that plagued in the past,
so should you use it? Well, the answer is still probably not.
C Cleaner does put common PC cleaning tasks into one program, true.
But modern versions of Windows already come with plenty of built-in tools
for cleaning up unneeded files and deciding what programs will run at startup.
And it's really pretty easy to just erase your Chrome data through the browser.
It even has automatic cleaning of its own. Driver updates are also usually handled automatically by utilities that come with your new hardware.
And seeing as most modern systems have SSDs,
C Cleaner won't do very much to make your system more responsive.
In a similar vein, those junk registry entries that C Cleaner and other PC tune-up programs
warn you about won't usually slow your system down or hurt anything.
And if the program accidentally messes with something in the registry that it shouldn't,
say there's a blank key somewhere that a piece of software expects to be there,
there's a chance you could end up breaking something important. So unless you have a really specific need for an app like C Cleaner,
you're probably better off skipping it. I mean, you spend enough time cleaning anyway, so what's a few more minutes?
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