Created and published by Piriform, CCleaner is a disk cleaning software that has been around since 2004. Amidst a sea of very harmful programs that pretend to be cleaning tools, it’s easy to be skeptical of any program marketed as such.
Indeed, malware programs of this type are quite common nowadays – they pretend to remove unwanted files and programs while actually installing all sorts of spy- or malware. It’s always better to be careful – don’t install programs if you aren’t sure where they came from or what they do!
As for CCleaner itself – it is safe to use. The program comes with various tools that allow for the removal of unused files, temporary or junk files and temporary data as well as privacy-related content. This could be cookies and cache files, for example.
There is one feature that’s part of CCleaner that should absolutely NOT be used by inexperienced users: The registry cleaner. While a computer registry can absolutely contain broken or damaged items, it’s absolutely inadvisable to interfere with things.
The registry cleaner is a separate tool from the ‘standard’ clean which is perfectly safe to run – unless you know what you’re doing. Especially if you use Windows 10, please steer clear of the registry cleaning tool. Due to the frequent updates to the Windows 10 OS, it’s common to find broken registry items, but they may still be needed in future updates, so removing them could cause more issues down the road.
Out of the many disk cleaning tools out there, CCleaner is one of the safest – just be sure to only download the program from the original website, rather than from third-party sources.
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