An Update For The Best Free Windows Cleanup Tool [1]

CCleaner has long been most people's favourite tool for cleaning up a bloated and slow Windows installation, and currently claims to have been downloaded more than a billion times. It's certainly way more powerful than the disk cleanup feature which is included in Windows. It'll tidy up temporary files, your registry, many well-known applications, and more, freeing up disk space and speeding up your PC.

Piriform, which makes CCleaner, released a new version last week, so if you're not running 5.15 you should upgrade. Among the new options is a cloud-based version which makes it easier to clean multiple computers if you have a company full of them. For home users, though, the stand-alone free option is still the best and simplest.

Just head to https://www.piriform.com/ccleaner [3] to download the 6.5 MB installer, which should run on all recent versions of Windows. Be aware that the program will offer to install the Google toolbar on your computer (which earns the company money if you agree). So if you don't want it, just uncheck the box.

Note that the program is safe and virus-free according to all my tests. However it does drop one mark on VirusTotal because one particular security product regards the toolbar installer option as potentially unwanted software. The other 54 products all give it a clean bill of health.