Rampidbyter Rampid byter: A byte of my .Net developing life.

While the name may be a little off the cuff i have to say CCleaner (crap cleaner) has been a very nice utility. Recently my step-brother acquired yet another virus on his laptop that like most malware utilities installed itself within one of this temp folders. I used the standard assortment of Avast, Spy-bot, Ad-aware, and now CCleaner to help get to those hard to reach temporary file locations. When running the typical assortment of anti-viral utilities the hardest thing to do is to validate that the malware/virus has been removed from all local directories. On top of that trying to locate the registry entries to the now hopefully removed files. With CCleaner the application is able to identify registry file path references that are no longer valid to be removed, among other things, and remove them within about 30 seconds. Not to mention it cleans out the contents of almost every temp file location on the system to help prevent reinstallation of the bad-ware.

This ability to remove both registry and file temp files helps ensure that when running Spy-bot, Ad-aware, and Avast that when the actual files are found then removed that nothing remains. This is not a 100% solution for removing malware or viruses but it sure helps. Running your typical virus scanner or anti-malware application can take anywhere from 10 minutes to 3 hours. With CCleaner you're able to run the application flat-out or use the analysis function to check the system for each file to be removed. The best part is it takes just mere seconds to run a complete check. In the world of waiting and waiting for a scan to complete for most applications the near instant cleaning capability is very refreshing.