Hi Dan,
Thanks for the comment. CCLeaner generally finds less “Junk” than other cleaners like Wise or Privazer and is therefore considered less aggressive and possibly a little safer. In 2017, after Avast bought CCLeaner from Piriform, there was a major malware infection when over 2 million CCleaner users had their computers infected with malware. Many stopped trusting CCLeaner. That being said, I still use CCLeaner now and then. However, I do not use its software cleaner, driver update and other tools. Only its cleaner. In addition, I only use the Portable version, not the installed version.

Thanks for the comment Tom.

I reread and saw I missed that line. I have indexing disabled on my desktop. I have Windows 10 installed on a 200GB SSD with 90GB for Windows, 70GB for Linux Mint and 40GB for a shared data area. I knew indexing was taking up space, so disabling it bought me another GB or so, don’t remember the exact amount but was surprised to find it was over 1GB checking after turning it off. One of these days I’ll buy a larger SSD.

Hi Lucio, I’m glad that you enjoyed the article. BTW, our Jim Hillier uses Privazer, too.

Hi Bob, Thanks for the comments. BTW, the first test had indexing turned on. The second test, indexing was disabled.

I hit “post” too quick. I meant to add, good article. Thanks.

P.S., besides running a “disk cleaner” and a “registry cleaner”, I also clear out the prefetch directory periodically, as it accumulates quite a few files over time – not that they take up a lot of space overall, but when you run a lot of different stuff every day, it adds its bump to things. I do notice a performance improvement for a week or two after cleaning up.

Why the original OS S/W went with this registry concept escapes me other than the original author wasn’t all that familiar with programming concepts at the time. I would have thought the use of control blocks would have been far more efficient, as they would only have to be allocated while an application is running. The OS and its supporting functions would have its own control blocks, which should not take up any more memory than that information does in the registry.

Hi Mindblower,
Thanks for the comments. I would consider updating Windows and cleaning junk (temporary files and unused entries in the Windows Registry) two separate items (although some may consider Windows junk 🙂 ). The tests in the post indicate that cleaning junk could result in moderately significant performance benefits. In addition, using the utilities in the above post, it only takes me a few minutes, which I perform every month or so.

Hey Terry,
Many here probably started out with an even slower PC and back then their eyes would have been tearing in envy looking at your P2/266mhz with 64MB RAM .

I think my first PC had an 8086 cpu and ran at 4.77 mhz. I remember it had a turbo button that would boost it’s speed to 8 mhz! I always thought “why would anyone run it at 4.77 instead of 8?” and always had it pushed in. I think it had 64 KB RAM and I paid a fortune to upgrade it to 256 KB (or maybe it had 256 KB and I upgraded to 512 KB, but it was less than 1 MB). I also paid a small fortune to add an 8087 or some such co-processor thinking that would speed it up (it didn’t). It ran on floppy disks and I spent another small fortune adding a 10 MB hard drive.. My thought at the time was “I’ll probably never need more storage space” but that thought didn’t last long.

I don’t remember what the boot time was, but it was not fast.