CCleaner

Download
CCleaner (Crap Cleaner) removes all sorts of unused files, temp files, cookies, log files, cached files and other files from your computer. This is something that all computer users should do on a regular basis, not just to free up space on the hard drive but for better performace as well. A hard drive cleaner would be the first thing you would use when you have performance problems or system starts behaving erratically.

As hard drive cleaners go this is one of the coolest out there, not just because it is 100% free but because it is very fast and does the job efficiently and has a nice, intuitive interface.It also completely erases all internet “tracks”, including cookies and history files, protecting your privacy from anybody who might want to monitor your internet behavior. CCleaner works with IE, Firefox, and Opera. It will also automatically detect the recently used file lists of most installed applications and erase those tracks as well.

CCleaner also delivers 2 other functionalities as a registry cleaner and uninstaller. Although these both seem to work quite well, I must confess that I almost never use them, and it is the hard drive cleaning functionality that I makes me install and use this software. Having said that I will also admit that the registry cleaner seems to work quite well, in that it finds and resolve issues and does not seem to cause any undesirable side effects that are always a risk with registry cleaning tools in general. It also allows you to back up the registry before doing any intervention in case you wanted to undo these afterwards.

Note: this software will attempt to install the Yahoo toolbar (UK version) on your machine if you use the default install options, which is a bit annoying. If you don’t want this, make sure to uncheck the Yahoo toolbar checkbox in the install options.