The new Ccleaner 4 for Windows cleans even better

Ccleaner has been around for years and it is a small utility that cleans up the rubbish that is created on the disk drive by Windows and applications. If you have never come across this utility before, you should check it out because it is really good and it is free too.

Run Ccleaner and it scans the disk drive for web browser caches and history, Windows Explorer  thumbnail caches, recent document lists, temporary files, clipboard contents, memory dumps, log files and so on. Junk files created by certain applications are scanned for, like Flash, Microsoft Office, Windows Media Player, anti virus software and so on. When scanning is complete you can delete the junk (or cancel).

It also scans the registry for junk entries, such as for software you no longer have, faulty entries and so on. These can be cleaned out too.

It's a great tool, but my advice is not to try to do everything at once. Use the tick boxes to select a small number of items to clean up, check your PC is OK, then clean up a few more items. I've not heard of problems with Ccleaner, but I've heard of people using other cleanup tools that have created problems by removing something that they shouldn't have.

Ccleaner 4 is about a week old, so it's brand new still and it has a number of new features:

• New improved graphics and icon.
• Improved internal architecture for better performance.
• New Duplicate File Finder tool.
• New System and Browser Monitoring (Pro Version).
• Optimized and improved Registry Cleaning.
• Added cleaning for Avast Antivirus 8, Adobe Photoshop CS6, Samsung Kies and Real Player 16.
• Improved Drive Wiper performance.
• Optimized Startup item detection algorithm.
• Optimized 64-bit builds on Windows 7 and 8.
• Many performance improvements and bug fixes.

There are free and Pro versions and the new Duplicate File Finder tool is in both of them. There are many alternatives that do just as good a job, but now there's on in Ccleaner so you don't have to run a separate utility. There's been an option to run it on startup for some time, but now if you're a Pro user, it can run on shutdown too, so your PC's cleaned ready for next time. The Pro tool can also monitor the system and detect when to run cleanup session based on the amount of disk space that can be reclaimed.

My own preference is for the portable version that doesn't need installing. Get it from the Builds page.