cleaner

System Tray Cleaner is an interesting idea, a free Web-based utility that scans your system tray (also known as the Notification Area) and analyzes the results in Wikipedia to help you decide whether to keep them or not. You can disable icons or uninstall programs from the tool's online interface. If you basically have no idea what's in your system tray or how to get a handle on it with Windows, it may be worth your while to let System Tray Cleaner's server take a whack at it. If security is an issue and you already have … Read more

PC users have a lot of choices in free system cleaning utilities these days. Most seem to offer disk and registry cleaners and a variety of Windows tools like startup managers and uninstallers. They all seek to balance ease of use, system safety, and effectiveness. EasyPC Cleaner Free fits the description. We found it an effective disk and registry cleaner, once we'd set it up to meet our needs.

EasyPC Cleaner Free's attractive, efficient interface is much like most similar tools in general layout and design. It has a series of large buttons labeled 1-Click Clean, Disk Clean, … Read more

As freeware system cleaners go, Magix PC Check & Tuning Free offers a good balance. Some such tools are designed to be as easy to use as possible and give you few options and not enough information about what they're doing to your system. Others overwhelm beginners with options and detailed scan reports, and they often make it too easy to delete the wrong things. The freeware version of PC Check is designed to be easy to use yet useful to people with widely varying skills, yet it also lets you perform cleaning and tune-up operations separately as well … Read more

As long as your system is performing to expectations, there's no reason to risk trouble by weed-whacking your registry. On the other hand, tossing out junk left behind by Web sites and programs can boost your system's performance. If you like the idea of a free system cleaner but are put off by tools that do too much or don't offer enough user control, try AppCleaner. Like the others, AppCleaner finds and removes old, obsolete, and broken files, freeing up disk space and system resources, but only where you tell it to look. It offers several secure … Read more

Over time, the Windows Registry becomes a tangled jungle as programs are installed and removed and the debris of daily computing piles up. A good registry cleaner can scan your registry for invalid, orphaned, and corrupted entries and take out the trash, which typically makes your PC run a bit faster, more smoothly, and more safely. Registry Cleaner Free promises to analyze, clean, and optimize your registry. However, we found that the "free" part only goes so far.

Registry Cleaner Free has the stylish dark background, white fonts, and large, sleek, 3D buttons typical of the breed. The … Read more

Installing and uninstalling programs, browsing the Web, and just everyday computer use can take its toll on your PC's performance. That's why it's important to find the right cleaning utility to keep your computer running on all cylinders. SlimCleaner 1.8 is a unique program in that it uses crowdsourcing to provide active feedback for the software installed on your computer. Its speedy scans and all-inclusive features make it a must-have system utility.

SlimCleaner opens with a professionally designed, intuitive interface. On the left side of the window you have seven maintenance options: Cleaner, Optimize, Uninstaller, Browsers, … Read more

Having tons of apps to choose from is one of the main perks of having a smartphone. Unfortunately, some apps may be keeping more stuff on your phone than just the core files needed by the app. This "stuff" is the cache for each app, which can be easily cleaned out to offer more space for new apps. Normally, you would need to look at the details for each individual app to see how much cache space it is consuming. However, with the use of one small app you can view their cache sizes all in one place, … Read more

Take an overpowered Windows cleaning utility and wed it to the crowd, and you've got the free SlimCleaner 1.6 (download). The cleaning utility can do just about anything you can think of, from deleting browsing tracks to uninstalling programs to cleaning up the assorted file detritus that daily use of your computer creates. What makes this particular program interesting is that, like Soluto, it draws on anonymously contributed data from its users to help keep your system running like a well-oiled machine. Unlike Soluto, SlimCleaner is really for advanced users, people comfortable mucking around in Windows system settings. … Read more

ARO used to stand for Advanced Registry Optimizer, but Support.com changed it to Advanced Repair and Optimization to better reflect the program's enhanced capabilities. ARO's developers were appalled to learn that entirely too many PC users have little or no concept of system security. So ARO 2011 now deep-cleans junk files and scans your system for security risks. ARO 2011 is largely automatic, but hardly opaque in its operation. In fact, one of its best features is the way it explains things, such as describing each category in its registry scan instead of just listing them in … Read more