CCleaner

CCleaner

Price: $

We often use our computers without caring enough about whether certain issues are accumulating below the surface. Your computer has a threshold of how careless you can be before it slows down, starts glitching or restarting with Blue Screens of Death. Let's check out an app that can take care of it!

CCleaner is a maintenance tool for Windows. It's free to use but you can choose to upgrade to CCleaner Professional that offers some more advanced capabilities. The first tab once you open CCleaner is Health Check. It scans your computer for privacy concerns and ways to free up some space on your drives. If you are a Pro user, Health Check also scans for startup apps to disable and apps to update, in order to speed up your PC and close security loopholes in old versions of your apps.

The Custom Clean tab enables users to manually select what they want to remove from their computers. You can delete browser data, temporary files, and all sorts of files that can be removed without causing system instability. The Registry tab scans your registry for issues and offers to resolve them. You can create a registry backup in case something goes wrong but, usually, this just deletes unused entries and remains of formerly installed apps.

That's not all! The Tools tab offers even more amazing features. You can uninstall apps, update them (for Pro users only), manage programs and services that launch at startup, disable or uninstall browser plugins, and much more! You can even manage what shows up in your context menus! If you want to know what kind of files take up the most space on your drive, simply run the Disk Analyzer. You can use Duplicate Finder to find and delete duplicate files on your computer or you can launch Drive Wiper to securely erase the contents or free space of any drive.

CCleaner is definitely an all-in-one utility. The free version is more than enough for your needs but even paying $20/year for the Professional version sounds fair. Considering its sheer amount of features and how useful they are, it's no wonder CCleaner's been one of the most popular maintenance apps for Windows for many years now.