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22 February 2010
Microsoft Windows comes with tools bundled to perform disk cleaning and defragmentation. However, there are many third party applications available that either offer additional features, perform better or faster. One such application is CCleaner. CCleaner is freeware offered by Piriform and, quite simply, is extremely fast, thorough and highly configurable.
If you want to keep your Windows PC running smoothly, you need to perform regular drive maintenance. In this tutorial, we show you how to download, install and use CCleaner to perform disk cleaning and registry maintenance.
Download
1. To download CCleaner, go to http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner. Once there, click on « Download ». 
2. This brings you to a second page. Click on the « Alternative Download » link. 
3. From the pop-up window, click “Save File”. 
4. Save the file (ccsetup228.exe) to your “Desktop”. 
Installation
5. From the Desktop, click twice on « ccsetup228 » to launch the installation. 
6. If you are greeted with this, or a similar, Windows message window, click “Run”. 
7. Select your preferred installation language from the drop down list and click « OK ». 
8. Click « Next »… 
9. Click « I Agree… »… 
10. Click « Next »… 
11. At this step, I recommend not installing the CCleaner Yahoo! Toolbar (uncheck the last option box), only because browser real estate is already at a premium without filling it with tons of less than useful toolbars. Click « Install »… 
12. Click « Finish »… 
How to use CCleaner
13. You’ll want to run CCleaner about once every second week to once every month. When you run CCleaner, you may want to look through the “Windows” and “Application” cleaning options tabs. It is recommended to leave most options checked. However, if you prefer to keep your Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome or other browser session cookies or recently typed addresses, you may want to uncheck those. Why would you want to keep any cookies? While it is recommended to clean most cookies, some may be useful. For example, if you like to go to your Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo or GMX account and see your username already entered for you, you’ll want to keep at least those cookies. When you are ready, click “Analyze”. CCleaner will quickly scan your PC and produce a report of which files should be cleaned and how much disk space you will recover. 
14. If you are ready to proceed, click “Run Cleaner”. 
15. You will get a confirmation window warning you that the files will be permanently deleted if you proceed. Click “OK”.
16. That’s it for the “Cleaner”. For those of you accustomed to using Windows’ Disk Cleanup utility will likely note that CCleaner is quite a bit faster.
Registry cleaner
CCleaner also offers a “Registry cleaning” utility. For those of you asking what the registry is, the registry is a database that stores settings, options and other key information for your Windows components as well as 3rd party applications and updates. As applications are installed, uninstalled, updated, etc…, many registry entries become dead references.
1. To clean your registry, click the “Registry” button on the left.
2. Click the “Scan for Issues” button.
3. if issues are detected, click the “Fix selected issues” button.
4. You will prompted to backup changes to your registry. I suggest you click “Yes” and save the backup to a secure location.
5. Once you have saved your registry backup, you will be greeted by this window. Simply click “Fix All Selected Issues”.
6. That’s it for the registry. If you experience any issues and would like to restore your registry to it’s prior state, simply navigate to the folder where you saved your registry backup. Right-click the registry backup file and select “Merge” from the contextual menu.
Other CCleaner Tools
I will not go into detail on how to use these additional tools bundled with CCleaner. Suffice it to say that if you click the “Tools” icon on the left of the Cleaner window, you will have access to 3 additional maintenance tools. The first “Uninstall” is (you guessed it!) an application uninstaller. Easily accessible and thorough, if you wish to uninstall an application, select it from the list and click “Run Uninstaller”.
If you wish to Enable/Disable certain applications from loading on Startup, you can access them by clicking the “Startup” button. Some applications should always be enabled (ie Antivirus). Others can be disabled to speed up Windows startup.
You can further clean your disk by removing old system restore points.
There it is! If you would like to breathe new life into a sluggish PC, disk maintenance and cleanup is the first place to start. For an easy to use and excellent free application, you cannot go wrong with CCleaner from Piriform.
Thanks for reading!
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