Cleaning Files with Ccleaner (analyze)

Exercise 3-Chapter 3: CCleaner

Figure 3-1: Cleaning files with CCleaner (Analyze)

Figure 3-2: Run Cleaner

Figure 3-3: Making exceptions for cookies

Figure 3-4: Opening Web browser and analyze

"CCleaner supports the cleaning of temporary or potentially unwanted files left by certain programs." Before I did this exercise I already installed CCleaner in my computer. Like its name, CCleaner is quite useful to clean up the history and data that you don't want to keep permanent. From the CCleaner instruction, I usually run this program once a month. I found out that every time after cleaning the unwanted files, my compute runs faster than before. In addition, there is more memory space left. "CCleaner also includes a registry cleaner to locate and correct problems in the Windows registry, such as missing references to shared DLLs, unused registration entries for file extensions, and missing references application paths" There are four icons on the left of screen (Figure 3-1). Cleaner is the main feature of the program and is selected when you start CCleaner. There are also options to protect the personal privacy by removing traces and cookies of the websites you have visited.

If with native windows XP, I don't think there is any building program in CCleaner. Recycle bin can empty but the files still exist, I still have to buy third party software to wipe the data I just deleted. There are some advanced software only for Windows XP.

• Old Prefetch Data- To run quickly, Windows uses prefetch files to store information about programs that you frequently use. The Cleaner deletes old prefetch data for programs that no longer exist or haven't been used in a long time.

• Hotfix Uninstallers - Every time you download and run a Hotfix from Microsoft, Windows stores an un-installation program for that Hotfix on your system.

I searched the CCleaner official website, finding out the above two software are only suitable for Windows XP. From my perspective, Windows XP needs special program to delete data and files, this is why isn't include in the secure deletion option. If I use third party software to wipe the unwanted data, I actually write bunch of 0's and 1's to the hard drive in order to block that the data I wanted to erase.

The different levels of secure deletion are reasonable for many perspectives:

• Permanent/ Temporarily: Some data we might don't want to keep anymore, however, some data we might don't need at this point. Thus, we need to separate