CCleaner is a very efficient and easy to use utility that cleans and optimizes your PC to ensure best performance and freedom from malware.

The beauty of free download CCleaner is the speed at which it carries out the various scans and fixes. Its main purpose is to clean any unnecessary files from your hard-drive and on opening the program you see the various aspects of Windows that you can search through and clear. CCleaner will also detect your installed applications that may hold on to files which are no longer any use, such as Google Earth histories or Flash Player configurations. The uninstaller is probably more useful, and more powerful, than Windows own uninstaller although use it with care! If you don’t know what an entry relates to in the program list, leave it alone to be on the safe side otherwise you could end-up removing vital components.

When you install CCleaner, it will prompt you whether you want to install Google Chrome as well and whetheryou want to use CCleaner to preserve cookies that you use regularly to log-onto websites, security checks etc.

The interface in CCleaner is very easy to navigate and before taking any action, you will always be asked to confirm that you are sure about what you want to do. There is a useful registry checker that will quickly check its integrity, and let you fix bad entries after making a backup. CCleaner uninstall and startup tools are very handy to have overall and simply add to the usability of this very rounded little maintenance assistant.

The most recent release of CCleaner now comes with a Drive Wiper. Drive Wipe can be accessed in the Tools section of CCleaner and allows you to choose whether to scrub only free space or an entire drive using three levels of strength – Department of Defense-level three-pass option, a National Security Administration-level seven-pass cleaning or a 35-pass Gutmann-level deep scrub.

There’s also improved support for cleaning files left behind by Google Chrome and Internet Explorer 9. Web Apps that use HTML5 database storage are also now included in CCleaner’s cleaning process. Finally, a few more System directories have been targeted for cleaning and CCleaner now supports 64 bit machines.