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IcyButters t1_it7gzbx wrote

Tom Warren usually does really great work reporting on Microsoft stuff, so I can only assume he's using CCleaner as an easy point of comparison as something people will have heard of, because this tool bears zero resemblance to CCleaner in any way. It looks legitimately very useful, but it's just them bundling some hard-to-find tools in one easy package. It's not doing anything that you can't already do in Windows.

Also, stop using shit like CCleaner, it's not "cleaning" anything.

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ShawnyMcKnight t1_it83kqz wrote

How does CCleaner not clean anything? I know that I can do the tasks manually, but it has found several GB of temp files from installs that haven't cleared out. Back when storage was more limited CCleaner was a great tool, I don't use it as much anymore because of all the popups to upgrade.

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IcyButters t1_it8kipj wrote

Contrary to popular belief, it is actually a very bad practice to use any of these third-party "cleaner" tools. The chance of them breaking something is far higher than the chance of them actually helping, although they are mostly just snake oil. For instance, Windows has a built-in tool to clean up old temp files, and it's had it for a very long time. Why you would use CCleaner for this is beyond me. If there's anything CCleaner deletes that Windows doesn't, there's probably a reason for that, and I'm inclined to believe Microsoft knows more about their own OS than the CCleaner devs (please hit cancel on any dumb Microsoft jokes you're about to post). I've literally seen people break their computer doing exactly the thing you described, because they didn't realize those old "temp" files were actually the uninstallers for applications that were still installed. You ever try to uninstall something through Control Panel only to get a "cannot find file" error? That happens because someone or something deleted some files they weren't supposed to.

And /u/EvilC0leslaw is right. The registry doesn't need to be cleaned because the registry can't get "dirty." It's just a hierarchical config file store. Firefox puts its registry keys under HKLM\SOFTWARE\Mozilla. It makes no difference to Firefox if there's a bunch of unnecessary keys under HKLM\Software\App You No Longer Use.

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EvilC0leslaw t1_it8cdil wrote

That's fine. It's moreso the core "registry cleaning" function which is pretty much useless, and in some cases could cause issues. Orphaned registry keys really aren't going to cause a problem for a system in the vast majority of cases.

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omnichronos t1_it7exh1 wrote

In what way is it better than CCleaner?

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EvilC0leslaw t1_it82ubk wrote

Presumably it doesn't have malware, so that's a start.

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omnichronos t1_it83fra wrote

It's funny you should say that because when I saw PC Manager required it to be downloaded from a Chinese website, I thought it might have malware. I've used CCleaner for years without an issue.

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Time-Opportunity-436 t1_it86u55 wrote

well Microsoft is yet to 'officially' announce or release it. Once they actually do that they'll fix the websites. this seems to be an unfinished product, still in beta considering the English and stuff.

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EvilC0leslaw t1_it8c25y wrote

Version 5.33 had malware (a trojan) injected by unknown actors. And then in 2019 there were more attempts to insert malware that were foiled by Avast.

And yeah I wouldn't be surprised if a leaked program made available on sketchy sites were compromised.

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thankfulofPrometheus t1_it88j2o wrote

So lemme get this straight, microsoft makes a product that cleans itself instead of making a os that does it natively? (Builtin feature like win defender ) WTF?

Edit: for clarification of my tiny rant, had microsoft made a more refined os, we wouldn't need CCleaner, tweeknow, PC Manager or any other windows cleaning tool.

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