Best Free File Cleaner

Best Free File Cleaner My first choice here is CCleaner [1], a product that started off as pretty basic but has continued to improve to the point where it is now very close to the best in its class regardless of price. It's very effective in freeing up disk space by removing unused and temporary files, cookies, Recycle bin entries, Windows hot-fix files, sold prefetch data, history and cache files in many applications such as Internet Explorer and Firefox and much more. Additionally it will check the Windows Registry for invalid entries. There are some minuses: first the installation settings are quite aggressive so do check them carefully. Second the product installation, by default, includes the installation of the Yahoo Toolbar so if you don't want it, make sure you uncheck that option. Finally I wouldn't trust this product to do your Registry cleaning; that's a job for a specialist utility. Similarly if your aim is to remove all your surfing traces rather than just to clean up your disk I'd be inclined to use a specialist cache cleaner. However if simply freeing up disk space is your objective the CCleaner is hard to beat. A good companion to CCleaner is Empty Temp Folders. It's not as complete a product as CCleaner and it's been a while since it was last updated however I find it always manages to clean more temporary file than CCleaner. That's why I suggest you use both. Another cleaner with a solid following is Steven Gould's CleanUP! [3] It's a compact, well designed and very well maintained and is a real alternative to CCleaner. I've had a couple of instances of it causing problems on my test PC but this may be specific to my setup. Certainly the feedback I get from users has been uniformly excellent.
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[1] http://www.ccleaner.com/ Freeware, all Windows versions, 1.4MB [2] http://www.danish-shareware.dk/soft/emptemp Freeware, Windows 98 and later, 667KB [3] http://www.stevengould.org/software/cleanup/download.html Freeware, Windows version unstated, 331KB.