Advanced CCleaner Tips to Perform Enhanced Disk Cleanup on your Windows

CCleaner is a FREEWARE system optimization, privacy and cleaning tool, one of the best disk cleanup utilities for your Windows PC. It removes unused files from your system – allowing Windows to run faster and freeing up valuable hard disk space. It also cleans traces of your online activities such as your Internet history. Additionally it contains a fully featured registry cleaner.

The tiny software program is simple, but powerful. It can wipe away your tracks from Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and Google Chrome from various Windows system areas, and from some third-party applications, such as Nero Burning ROM, Adobe Flash Player, WinRAR and more. The recent version even adds support for Microsoft Office 2010, RealPlayer SP and Opera search field history cleaning.

Besides common functions of CCleaner, there are many useful advanced tips to employ CCleaner as your system cleaner and disk wiper.

• More than deletion – Wipe traces and history

I discussed this topic months ago – Top Excellent Software Programs to Perform Disk Wipe for Free. In fact, CCleaner can do the job, too.

First, switch to “Settings” in “Options” tab, select “Secure file deletion” and the erase method, the larger number the better, but higher value will consume lots of time. For example, “Gutmann(35 passes)” means 35 times of data rewriting.

Secure Deletion function in CCleaner

Then, you can specify files and folders to wipe out in addition to pre-defined system or application areas.

You can include custom paths to be wiped out

At last, check all the items you want to wipe out, especially “Custom Files and Folders” and “Wipe Free Space” (you can configure drives to be wiped in the first step). Click “Analyze” and then “Run Cleaner”.

• Clean your system after startup and before shutdown

If you rarely shutdown even restart your computer, there will be lots of junk files need to clean up. You can now let CCleaner do them for you silently and automatically.

First of all, you need to configure CCleaner in Cleanup Areas and Options.

Then, create a shortcut to CCleaner. Add /AUTO /SHUTDOWN parameters after the target path.

For example “C:\Program Files\CCleaner\CCleaner.exe” /AUTO /SHUTDOWN

Shortcut to CCleaner

AUTO parameter means run CCleaner to clean up pre-defined areas silently; SHUTDOWN parameter means shutdown computer after processing cleanup. That means, if you want to clean your system after startup, you can drag the shortcut (with AUTO parameter ONLY) to “Startup” in Windows Start Menu; if you want to do the job before system shutting down, just double click the shortcut (with AUTO and SHUTDOWN parameter). Rather easy.

• Remove unused MSConfig startup items

Many of you may like to manage system startup items with Microsoft Windows MSConfig utility. However, sometimes even if you have uninstalled a software application, the program’s startup item in MSConfig still exists.

Clean up MSConfig startup items in CCleaner

CCleaner can remove these used MSConfig startup items. Just switch to “Startup” in “Tools” tab, select the specific startup programs, and then click “Delete”.

Haven’t used CCleaner before? Download CCleaner and try it now – totally free!

Have more tips or suggestions to share with us? Comments are welcome