Simple Computer “Tune-up” Using CCleaner

Has your computer been running slower than normal? This could be due to too much buildup of temporary files and unneeded registry keys. In this tutorial, we will walk through using a free application called CCleaner to clean up these pesky issues. CCleaner can be downloaded here. This link will automatically download the file. Save the file to your PC.

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Once the download finishes, you will have the above icon on your desktop (or wherever you downloaded the file to).

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Double-click on the file to being the installation. The above window is the first to appear. Simply select the language in which you would like to install CCleaner. Once you have selected your preferred language, click on OK.

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The above window just welcomes you to the installation wizard. It is recommended that you close all other applications before continuing. Click next to continue.

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This is the User-License agreement. Once you have completed going through it, click the I agree button.

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This window allows you to choose where you would like to install the application files for CCleaner. If you don’t know, just leave them default.

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Here, we pick our installation options. We can pick whether or not we want a Start Menu Folder (Start->Programs->CCleaner) and Desktop icon. Also we can pick to have the open and run CCleaner options come up when we right-click on the Recycle-Bin. I only use the open option for the recycle bin. Once you have selected your options, click on install to continue.

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Once the installation completes, you will see this window. Click on Finish to close it out. Now, depending what options you installed: you may have an icon on the desktop, in the start-menu or from the recycle bin. Since I did only the recycle bin, that is how we are going to launch CCleaner in this tutorial.

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Right-click on the recycle bin and select Open CCleaner.

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This window is the main window for CCleaner. The list to the left is the list of things that will be removed. There is a lot there. I am not going to go into detail about what each does as most of them should explain themselves. The ones that don’t, aren’t checked. To see them and use them, check the Advanced check box at the bottom of the list. This will give you a series of pop-ups alerting you to what some of them do. Pay attention to what it tells you and un-check it if you feel that you don’t want to remove them. These windows are listed below:

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To start the process, click on the Analyze button.

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The upper right hand part of the panel will show you how much information you are going to remove after running the Analyzer.

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Once the analyzer completes. You will be able to click on Run Cleaner now. Click on this button to begin the cleaning process.

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Click on the button will give you the above box. Check the box that says Don’t show me this message again and the click on OK. This box just tells you that it is about to delete these files that you have selected. Once deleting completes, it will give you a report about it, showing the files it deleted. This will be a great help to your system already, but we are not done yet.

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Now, click on the Registry icon to the left. The above section will appear. The checkboxes indicate things that will be looked as incorrect or invalid keys.

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Click the Scan for Issues button at the bottom to begin looking for erroneous keys. Once it is done scanning. Click on the Fix Selected Issues button to begin removing these keys.

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Once you click on this button, you will get this pop-up. It allows you to save you registry settings. If you click no, it will continue to the removal screen, if you click yes, you will have to pick where to save the .reg file incase you need to undo the changes. I’m going to click no on mine.

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This window will go through each error and tell you what it is and why it appeared. This would take a long time. We are going to click on the Fix All Selected Issues button to speed things up a bit.

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It will prompt you to see if your are sure that you want to remove all of the issues you found. Click on yes to accept.

Once it is finished removing the files in question it lets you know that they were removed successfully. Click on the close button to close that window. This concludes this tutorial. I hope this helps you, and was easy to follow. Thanks for reading.