161–170 of 229 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
CCleaner does sell a bit of FUD though - "your computer is slow, use us so it goes faster". I don't think "crap" is causing significant slowdowns anymore, maybe frees up some disk space but nothing that the OS can't do itself either.
Deactivating that programs start on boot, maybe?
As a kid, the only OS I was aware of was Windows. Once, my computer was infected to the point where it was almost unusable. A more experienced friend suggested a non-free antivirus and the CCleaner. After a lot of effort, I could get my machine back to working, but it became so slow that it led me to discover Linux. Now, on a Windows 10 machine, I’ve nothing but Defender, and since the aforementioned experience I’ve…
Years ago I used to use CCleaner and their disk defragmentor tool. Now I too am on Windows 10 and use neither, still it's sad to see this sort of thing happen to what I remember being decent free software.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
CCleaner is not an Anti-Virus. It does not run in the background (at least the free version) and will not slow your PC. It helps users locate and remove temporary/cache files buried in the OS to free up disk space. It is very useful - even for pros. Defender will not do this.
CCleaner is also essential for cleaning up poorly uninstalled apps leaving registry keys lingering around. It's also great for when you need to fully reset and reinstall a misbehaving app, such as Symantec Endpoint Protection, which fails to clean up several critical registry keys that it checks during installation, and then refuses to re-install if they exist. Sure, you could hunt them down and write a script for Sy…
https://np.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/6ifyxq/spotify_for_...
In addition, this also gives you granular privacy control
https://www.howtogeek.com/221864/digging-into-and-understand...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Free and non-free AV are liabilities at this point (for Windows). Microsoft has never had an official way to let AV hook into the system calls needed, so they all relied on hacks and shifty stuff. Surprise, surprise, now there is more attack surface available since AV is kernel level. And so now we see attacks getting root or kernel level access via AV vulnerabilities.
Unfortunately attack surface on AV also includes Windows Defender itself: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/06/lates...
CCleaner like Avast never make the job for me, I have always told people to stop using it.. but user need proof. Even with ton of subject "I have removed X with CCleaner and now I.."
Anecdotally, I've seen CCleaner delete way too many false positives in the Registry, breaking applications, (and people have never heeded it's warning to properly backup the Registry), and worse entirely corrupt Registry Hives, breaking Windows.
The Hive database format of the Windows Registry was built to be read-mostly/write-rarely and doesn't survive well to active surgery, especially not "I run CCleaner once a week with all the options checked". Like I said, I've seen it corrupt entire Hives from too regular operation.
I'm also of the opinion that some of that "Windows slowdown" that these users complain of is a snowball impact of too much Registry surgery leaving sadly deteriorated/badly optimized for reading Hives behind, but that's mostly a hypothesis I have not scientifically proven.
[1] I kind of forgive people still running Avast out of habit from bad old XP days (not everyone got on the Microsoft Security Essentials train as fast as they could, and that was as much a marketing/awareness problem), though as knowledge that Windows Defender exists spreads there are increasingly fewer excuses to still run Avast.
There has been a number of cases of installers from trusted developers being infected lately. (For example Transmission being infected twice...) On our side (developers) we need to be careful with this idea that "we will know" when something is wrong and be more careful when deploying software. It would also be nice if some form of tool could be used to test a binary to make sure it only contains what it should conta…
Bundled installers are the worst thing about the old way windows software was distributed.
Office itself is in Preview on the Windows Store, and when that comes out of Preview, other developers are especially going to be on notice to get applications into APPX packages, if not the Store, because for most applications if Office can do it, so can you.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand the question. Maintenance will always be a thing, carried out by humans, cron, or the os itself doesn't really matter.
Why doesn't MS Windows do the maintenance - CCleaner does things like clean up ancient cache files, remove Windows update files, remove registry entries for software that's no longer installed. That sort of maintenance seems like it's the result of poor design in an OS that has the hood welded shut. I actually used ccleaner on Win 10 recently, an MS update had associated loads of files with TWINUI which wasn't instal…
Windows 10 can already do this by default.
> remove registry entries for software that's no longer installed.
Uninstalling old style Windows software is a hard problem that generally can't be done in a foolproof way, without potentially breaking stuff, due to bad legacy design decisions like giving programs free reign to install stuff wherever they want, without a proper application model nor dependency tracking. Therefore, registry cleaners are also prone to break things.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2563254/microsoft-s...
> That sort of maintenance seems like it's the result of poor design in an OS that has the hood welded shut.
That's what UWP solves.
https://np.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/6ifyxq/spotify_for_...
> It also let me simply check and disable startup programs
This is already in the Windows 10 UI.