What computer cleaner program do you use

and why?

currently i have glary ccleaner and wisecare 365…

they all are nice but i dont like using 3 4 cleaners…is there one top one? seems like i use one and then use another and each find something the previous missed.

Everyone’s going to have a different idea of what should and shouldn’t be cleaned, which is why they’ll keep finding different things. A lot of the time they’re superfluous things anyway, like previous file listings or temporary internet files. I’ve even seen them want to delete the thumbnail cache, just to slow down any disc access where that cache might have been used by re-populating it.

So long as it cleans out old temporary files (which should be done automatically once they’re about a week old anyway), old driver files, installers for updates that have already installed, and maybe error reports, everything else is superfluous. You could maybe make an argument for orphan file type associations, but that’s more a convenience thing than anything else.

All of that, save the file associations, can be done using the built-in Disk Clean-Up tool in Windows.

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On Windows, I don’t use anything and am just judicious about what I install, because by far the biggest problem with Windows is programs putting files in all sorts of places they don’t belong (and subsequently not properly cleaning up on uninstall). If you avoid the programs that act badly like this and let Windows Defender catch the remaining oddballs you won’t have much trouble.

On macOS I do even less, because with the latest release by default all system-related directories are strictly read-only, even for programs with admin privileges. This means that any “dirtying” that can happen is for the most part restricted to your user account, making cleanup dead simple… it’s mostly just checking /Users/<name>/Library/ for files related to the offending program. No utilities needed. Alternatively, if you want a clean slate, just create a new user account and delete the old one.

One thing that I always have handy for both operating systems, though, is a utility that does nothing but show what’s eating up disk space (zero auto-clean functionality). For Windows this is WinDirStat and on macOS this is OmniDiskSweeper.

Generally speaking, one cleanup program is unnecessary let alone four of them. They typically do things that are unnecessary at best and can at times be harmful, especially things like registry cleanup.

Ccleaner is a pretty reasonable registry cleaner, if you insist on doing that sort of thing. Beyond that if you run the built-in windows cleanup tool periodically, that’s about all you should do. Cleaning out temporary files and caches constantly isn’t necessary or beneficial. Do it every once in a while using windows own tools and you’re good.

Linux only, so

Bleachbit.

My internet provider gives us McAfee and I also have the Microsoft security defaults. I have the suite on one system and a different triple firewall on another with split hardware. So not often I have a problem. Though I did switch my other computer OS because it was having issue.