notaguru wrote:
> This laptop with Vista Home Premium is working perfectly, and I'd like
> to keep it that way despite frequent trial installations of various
> applications and very heavy usage online. There are no games.
>
> To block malware it depends on Vista's built-in security plus Avast and
> Windows Defender, and each week it is scanned by AV and SpybotSD. It
> uses Vista's defrag.
>
> My assistant (who is still young enough to know everything) has proposed
> a prophylactic addition of ccleaner to the weekly process. I want to
> avoid problems, not create them...
>
> What do you think?
Periodically (monthly should be fine for most purposes) using CCleaner
to clean up and remove temporary files can help keep the computer
performing well.
However, never, ever use it to "clean" the registry. Granted,
CCleaner's registry scanner seems relatively benign, as long as you step
through each detected "issue" one at a time, to determine if it really
is an "issue" or not, and then decide whether or not to let the
application "fix" it. In my testing, though, most of the reported
"issues" won't be issues, at all. I tried the latest version on a
brand-new OS installation with no additional applications installed, and
certainly none installed and then uninstalled, and CCleaner still
managed to "find" over a hundred allegedly orphaned registry entries and
dozens of purportedly "suspicious" files. Its findings were utter
nonsense, in plain terms.
CCleaner's only real strength, and the only reason I use it, lies
in its usefulness for cleaning up unused temporary files from the hard
drive; as a registry "cleaner," it's not significantly different from
any other snake oil product of the same type.
--
Bruce Chambers
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