Spring is here and so is spring cleaning. Here are two small utilities that can help you clean up temporary files, unused registry entries, and unwanted applications.
CCleaner is a multi-use tool. After a quick and small install, you’re ready to go. CCleaner is a tool for cleaning up all those files that you don’t really care about like the temporary internet files, cookies, Recent Documents, and many more. It also includes a Registry cleaner so that you can remove any unused file associations and get rid of things that are no longer in use (file types associated with programs that are no longer installed, etc.). Beyond that, it also includes an uninstall tool and a startup analyzer. These will allow you to remove programs or just stop them from starting when Windows loads. CCleaner just puts all of these related tools in one convenient interface.
Most of the work is automated, you just set CCleaner to Analyze and then Clean if you like the results. You can trim down the list and set include/exclude paths in the Options window among other settings. I’ve seen a real performance boost on machines after running CCleaner.
ATF-Cleaner is a no-install-necessary utility that can clean up temporary files from your Windows system and temporary files specific to the Mozilla Firefox and Opera browsers. A little more specific than CCleaner, ATF Cleaner is small and light, perfect for a jump drive toolkit. It deletes the Windows Temporary files, the user’s Temp files, All Users temp files, cookies, Temporary Internet Files, Internet Explorer’s History, the Java Cache, and the Recycle Bin.
Using the above two tools in conjunction with Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware software is a pretty effective update to removing spyware and malware. Since malware (adware and spyware) likes to hide a lot of files to reinstall itself in the Temporary Files directories, these tools are essential to really finishing up a virus/malware cleanup job.