Cleaning up your PC - CCleaner

Cleaning up your home PC (or Mac) with Piriform's CCleaner.

From time to time, you feel like your home computer is running slow and you'd like to tune things up to regain some of your lost feeling of quickness.  One of the tools useful for doing that is Piriform's CCleaner.

CCleaner is a utility that's good for going through your home PC to look through your system and remove any temporary files, cookies, and so forth that you no longer need but may now be dragging your system down a little.  Removing this 'cruff' will free up some space, and give your computer less to do when looking through it's temporary storage space, making you feel like you're regaining some of your speed.

Malware Doctor has done a very in-depth tutorial that covers far more than the regular home user needs to know about, but it's very good at showing you the first two key sections that you'll want to know about and see how to use:  Cleaner and Registry.

Cleaner is the primary section that removes old data, temporary files, things your computer no longer needs and frees up space that isn't really in use any longer.  There are a few things you may decide you want to un-check from the defaults, such as browser history, cookies, recently typed URL's; but that's up to you to decide.

The secondary section is the Registry.  It's debated back and forth if this really helps or not.  I believe that it does, but remember you really only see this help out mostly a boot time.  It may not be something you need or want to clean up regularly, but it's generally not something that will hurt you to do; as long as you backup the things you're removing.  (Which is covered in the tutorial.)

Tech Coach Albert also has a more basic tutorial about CCleaner, including download and installation instructions.  (Both tutorials are on an older version of the application, but they still apply to the current version.) He doesn't cover more than the Cleaner section, but it's again, the primary section you want to know how to comfortably get around in.

As a final word, this application is also available for the Macintosh, and the instructions in Tech Coach Albert's tutorial will apply to that version too.