Three More CCleaner Tips
Last week I blogged about CCleaner, my favorite dusting and cleaning utility.
I received a couple of messages about the tool that I thought you'd like to read.
The first is from blogger Bill Webb. Bill advised "not to set the default deletion method (under "Options, Settings") to "Secure file deletion" -- unless you've carefully thought it through. Sooner or later you'll run CCleaner and then have one of those 'Ah S**t' moments, whereupon you'll try to use all that cool data recovery software to no avail. It will happen eventually. That setting should only be used to delete specific cleaning jobs on specific classes of files, then returned to its normal setting. Trust me on this."
I will, Bill, definitely.
Dale, May OEMTech friend, told me about something I would've (no, make that should've) known about had I read CCleaner's help file. It's the winapp2.ini file that lets you further customize the program. Details are here.
Dale also urges you to use CCleaner's built-in CYA back up feature to "make a backup of all the registry entries that it deletes just in case."
Finally, more than one of you encouraged me to tell everyone to uncheck the Cookies box (see screen below). That's good advice because CCleaner deletes all of them unless you mark specific cookies not to be deleted (from Options**Cookies).
Turn off cookie deletion in CCleaner
Talkback
Have something to say abut CCleaner? You can use Comments below or if you'd prefer, fire an e-mail right into my inbox.
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If CCleaner seems to be running slow try disabling the Start Menu and Desktop Shortcuts options.
For recovering files you accidentally deleted with CCleaner or any other way, try Recuva. I only mention it here because it is made by the same people as CCleaner and works very well.
If you do want to keep your cookies, don't forget to check the Applications tab where Firefox, Opera, and any other non-IE web browser options are. Personally I would suggest you go through all of the cookies you have in the Options Cookies part of CCleaner. There you can tell CCleaner what cookies to keep. It may not be easy to do, depending on how many places you go online, but can be pretty nice to have set up.
Thanks for the tip on Recuva, Jim. I bookmarked it just in case! One never knows! I've been using CCleaner for about a year and a half now and never had any problems, although I do always elect to backup my registry before it does its dirty work. I really like CCleaner and will take a look at the ini file as suggested. For cookies, yea, I agree I should go thru and mark which ones I want to keep. Just seems daunting cuz I suf *alot*. :-)
I also have customized my cookies thru internet options to block all third party cookies thanks to tips here. The only problem I have with that is checking my bank balance. For some reason that site needs them completely enabled, but I change it back as soon as I'm done.