PC Cleaners for Windows 10

[#1]

My Windows 10 laptop is slowing up a bit after 10 months use.  In the good old days of XP, I used to regularly run several PC Cleaners.  A freeware CCleaner was one of them.

Now with Windows 10, can anyone recommend the best PC Cleaner, preferably freeware ?

[#2]

In general I think you should be wary of PC cleaners because of their capability of doing more harm than good.  It's debatable if they still do anything worthwhile http://www.howtogeek.com/162683/pc-cleaning-apps-are-a-scam-heres-why-and-how-to-speed-up-your-pc/

It's worth running the Windows 'Disk Cleanup' just for space saving and I have never had any problems running Ccleaner.  I've seen Windows 10 computers that have slowed down because they mistook the hard drive for an SSD and stopped defragmenting it - so that is worth checking also.  Faulty hard drives can slow down a computer but you probably don't want to know that.    

[#3]

Similar to above I only have good things to say about CCleaner but would tend to avoid pretty much any other tool.

I havent had any issues using CCleaner on my Windows 10 PCs

[#4]

CCleaner is the only one to use

[#5]

I'll second that, CCleaner seems to do an excellent job on my windows 10 and it monitors performance.  

[#6]

Ccleaner thinks I am running Firefox although I am running Palemoon, if it can't get that right I'm certainly not trusting it with anything else!

[#7]

@Browni - That's how the browser will identify itself as it uses the same Mozilla engine.

[#8]

Beat me to it Mook !

[#9]

I've never been convinced about this idea of 'cleaning' a computer.

• Virus scans run faster on a 'cleaned' computer because there are less files to scan.  So I can see there is a benefit there but only from time to time.
• If your computer has to perform an operation that requires it to sort through a list of files I presume it will do this faster if the list is shorter.  So perhaps clearing out your browser cache every so often helps.browser performance.
• Hard drives start to become slow and fragmented after they get more than around 85% full (not SSDs).  But hard drives these days tend to be so large that's not very likely so the extra space you gain from 'cleaning' usually has little value.

Otherwise I cannot see why we expect to benefit from 'cleaning' a computer.  Are there other reasons or is it all past history and flimflam?

[#10]

I'd simply set the web browser's cache to a limited size, I've got Firefox's cache limited to 350MiB on this computer. The cache is intended to speed up web browsing, deleting it is only going to cause more content to be downloaded again. Likewise, deleting cookies will cause websites to show you the cookie choice pop-up again (that you get the first time you visit a web page).

[#11]

Browser caches date back to the time when we all had dial-up modems and internet connections were much slower.  I suppose you might benefit minute-to-minute but would you notice the difference if the cache was cleared every time you close the browser? 

[#12]

I might do, I might not, it depends on the web page. If you wanted the cache cleared each time you close the browser, you could set Firefox to do that, rather than getting a third party program to clear it.

Edit: you could also consider someone's server bandwidth that you might be needlessly wasting by clearing the cache and downloading the same things over and over.

[#13]

I think you are correct and Firefox will let you clear the cache on exit whilst preserving the history of sites visited (which I would want to do).  If you follow your server bandwidth argument to its logical conclusion then ISPs should maintain a cache of popular web sites.  I believe that happened once; does it still?  

[#14]

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@Browni wrote:

Ccleaner thinks I am running Firefox although I am running Palemoon, if it can't get that right I'm certainly not trusting it with anything else!

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Using detectmybrowser I get, in firefox compatibility mode,  "You're using Firefox version 38.9 on Linux" and with compatibility mode off  "You're using Mozilla version 2.1 on Linux".  I have the config item "general.useragent.enable_overrides" set to "false".

Phil

[#15]

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@ReedRichards wrote:

If you follow your server bandwidth argument to its logical conclusion then ISPs should maintain a cache of popular web sites.  I believe that happened once; does it still?  

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I wasn't really thinking of big popular websites, I was thinking more of smaller websites. But big websites use content distribution networks which might have nodes at Plusnet, and there's the Google Global Cache servers at Plusnet for Google.