CCleaner is a fantastic program that will give you powerful tools to clean and optimize your Mac. This app is great if you think your Mac’s speed has been below average. It will also be great if you know that you have a lot of useless files clogging up your Finder.

What is it and what does it do

Main Functionality

CCleaner is designed from the ground up to help you organize and clean out your Mac. It’s essential purpose is to delete files that you no longer need anymore. CCleaner is even willing to go as deep as your registry in order to make sure your Mac is running up to speed.

Pros

• Cleans out browsing data from browsers including Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari, and many more
• Empties recycle bin and deletes all temporary and log files
• Includes a registry cleaner to delete old and unneeded entries
• No spyware or adware
• Removes leftover files from uninstalled applications

Cons

• Deleting lots of files at once can be dangerous
• Can reset all settings on your OS
• Can be very slow when cleaning

Discussion

CCleaner, when used correctly, can be a fantastic program. It is a perfect alternative to CleanMyMac, and works almost as efficiently. CCleaner will go through your Mac and delete any files that you no longer need. You can specify before the clean which files you want touched and which files you want left alone. What’s terrific about CCleaner is that is contains no spyware or adware. It is a truly free application.

CCleaner will clean out a bunch of different files. For starters, it will completely clear your browsing history for nearly any web browser you can think of. This is great because these files are where the majority of the clutter on your Mac comes from. In addition, CCleaner will clean out all deleted and temporary files. This will empty your trash and delete log files, error reports, and caches. If all of that wasn’t enough, CCleaner will even go through your registry to make sure you don’t have any unneeded entries.

Now for the horror stories. As with any app like this, it can be dangerous deleting lots of files. There are many users out there who have used this application and gotten terrible results. In most cases, this application would completely reset all of the preferences on your Mac. This can be very annoying as it will reset application license keys, stored application preferences, and even data saved within the application. In addition, it has been reported that it deletes your custom dock, display settings, passwords, and game serial numbers. In one extreme case, it was reported that a user had lost all of his personal data contained in his user folder (which is essentially everything).

Conclusion and download link

Like I said, if you use this app correctly, you will not have a problem. After using it personally, I understand why so many people had bad experiences. You have to be very careful when you are deleting files. If you take it option by option, you should be fine. Overall this application does it’s job and it does it very well. It may be dangerous, but using a little common sense can avoid these issues. If you are not computer savvy, or don’t understand the inner-workings of your computer, then you will probably be better off using a fail-proof application like CleanMyMac.

Price: Free

Version reviewed: 1.03.131

Supported OS: OS X 10.5 or later

Download size: 2mb

CCleaner homepage