Lately, I’ve been experiencing some performance hick-ups from my laptop, all browsers would just freeze some crashing, Windows Explorer would shoot itself in the middle of opening my Photos folder, the whole rig just takes a lot longer to boot up than usual.

No viruses, worms, trojans or other malware are present. No spurious apps are installed, plus the drivers and OS are up to date.

Then I a question just dawned upon me, when was the last time I cleaned out the hard disk of temporary files and unwanted junk?

It’s then I decided to install CCleaner. Formerly called Crap Cleaner, but it still does the job very well, getting rid of crap unwanted files in your hard drive.

CCleaner

In quick gist, here’s what it does:

• Internet Explorer
  Temporary files, history, cookies, Autocomplete form history, index.dat.
• Firefox
  Temporary files, history, cookies, download history, form history.
• Google Chrome
  Temporary files, history, cookies, download history, form history.
• Opera
  Temporary files, history, cookies.
• Safari
  Temporary files, history, cookies, form history.
• Windows
  Recycle Bin, Recent Documents, Temporary files and Log files.
• Registry cleaner
  Advanced features to remove unused and old entries, including File Extensions, ActiveX Controls, ClassIDs, ProgIDs, Uninstallers, Shared DLLs, Fonts, Help Files, Application Paths, Icons, Invalid Shortcuts and more… also comes with a comprehensive backup feature.
• Third-party applications
  Removes temp files and recent file lists (MRUs) from many apps including Media Player, eMule, Kazaa, Google Toolbar, Netscape, Microsoft Office, Nero, Adobe Acrobat, WinRAR, WinAce, WinZip and many more…
• 100% Spyware FREE
  This software does NOT contain any Spyware, Adware or Viruses.

It’s a petite 3MB download and is completely free. Try it out, clean out your hard drive of unnecessary files, and speed up your system.

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