Yesterday I went to run one of my other favorite tools, CCleaner, and it didn’t appear to be on my machine. I love CCleaner, so I’m not sure why I would have removed it if I had, so that made me a bit curious.

Later I noticed that a VPN connection that I had setup in my “Network Connections” list was also gone.

I thought to myself that maybe running the defrag tool would have somehow moved these files and defragmented the hard drive in a way that would have deleted them from the system?

Anyone know the answer to that one?

Post from: EveryJoe

Will Defrag Delete Files

Here’s my list of applications that I used even today as I was cleaning up my family’s desktop PC.

CCleaner which is short for “CRAP” Cleaner. It does a great job of finding all the hidden pieces of installed applications that sometimes don’t get removed with the program’s default uninstall function.

Revo Uninstaller is very similar to CCleaner, but I choose to take advantage of both as an option in case one just won’t get rid of something. I usually run one, followed by the other to just insure that there are non remnants of anything I’m wanting to make sure I get rid of in the end.

Lavasoft Ad-Aware Free is a great tool for finding any malware, trojans, hijack apps and other annoying little critters that love getting into our systems and mucking everything up.

Windows Live OneCare has been my preferred option for real-time antivirus and malware protection on my systems and others. Recent news that Microsoft will be nixing their OneCare product may lead me to be looking for a replacement and free alternative in the future. Microsoft will be releasing a free option of their own, but I’ll wait and see how it looks before making a choice. I’m interested in what free antivirus applications you all recommend.

Belarc Advisor isn’t a tool to remove much of anything, but it provides a great resource for quickly cataloging and finding out what’s on your system and how you stand on a variety of security fronts.

Images: Various logos from application pages downloaded

Post from: EveryJoe

My Top Security and Maintenance Tools

Clean: Using CCleaner, I clean the PCs including all the browser caches and various other application caches. (Read my introduction to CCleaner here.)

Disk Cleanup: I run disk cleanup ($ leanmgr) on all the drives.

Registry: I run a registry cleaner (these days CCleaner itself) to clean the registries, after taking a backup of the current registry set.

Virus Scan: I run an entire PC scan, not just the scan across the “commonly infected areas”.

Defragment: Using the disk defrgamenter ($ defrag –a <drive>), I first analyze all the drives and if necessary defragment the recommended ones.

Updatedb: I update the Cygwin file index.

Backup: I take a backup of all important data on my Transcend Extensible Hard disk. A good idea, don’t you think?

Image Sources: CCleaner, Disk Cleanup and Disk Defragmenter.

Post from: EveryJoe

My Weekly Scheduled Jobs

CCleaner’s primary feature is the Cleaner. First, it will analyze the system, fetch the files that it is going to delete from the recycle bin, browser caches, other application caches, and many other obscure locations. The user can choose which areas to scan for and which to leave alone. Then the files can be deleted using any of the four secure file deletion options, but be warned that the greater the number of passes the fewer the chances of recovery if needed. There are many other customizations that can be made, like specifying the files and folders to be deleted and those to be excluded (apart from the usual set), the cookies to be preserved, and running from the command line.

CCleaner also has a registry cleaner than cleans the registry for any old or unclean or deleted entries. I think this feature can be made more robust. Be sure to save the registry before editing it.

Two other tools that come along are the “Uninstall” and “Startup” tools. The former can be used to uninstall programs. It is faster than the conventional “Add or Remove Programs” in loading the programs and also loads most programs unlike the regular option. The “Startup” tool can be used to disable or delete various startup processes, equivalent to the options provides by msconfig.

One other (unnecessary) feature I like about CCleaner is the way it displays the OS and the processor details when opened.

CCleaner is a regularly updated free software with new versions released every now and then. Download the latest version from the official CCleaner website. It is hardly 3 MB.

Image Source: CCleaner on my PC.

Post from: EveryJoe

Use CCleaner to Clean Your Computer