Last week we discussed cleaning up the cruft that is causing the rampant Winrot in our PC. A few of you wrote in to say that when it came to cleaning up the digital sludge in the Windows registry and other system and application areas, there was joy to be found using the free utility CCleaner.

The original name of CCleaner was "Crap Cleaner" and the developer, Piriform, apparently regrets the original name and is trying to rebrand the product to be just CCleaner. That's a shame, because the original name is more accurate.

When you launch the program you'll see a user interface divided into three columns. The left-most column shows the main functions: Cleaner, Issues, Tools and Options; the second column shows the settings for the selected function; and the third displays a progress bar and report panel. With Cleaner selected, there also are buttons for Analyze (that is, examine but don't do anything) and Run Cleaner (that is, cry havoc and let loose the dogs of war on my copy of Windows).

Selecting Cleaner (the default option on startup) lets you choose which Windows components and applications you want to clean up. For example, you have options to examine the attributes of Internet Explorer, Windows Explorer and the System, and there's an Advanced section for more obscure features.

There are a lot of choices here. For example, under Internet Explorer there are options for: cleaning up temporary files, cookies, browsing history, recently typed URLs; deleting index.dat files; erasing the last download location; and purging autocompleted forms history. This is a major spring cleaning and a very thorough privacy purge.

Under the Applications section, there are options for Firefox/Mozilla, Opera, various applications, Internet (Google toolbars and Sun Java), Multimedia, Utilities (such as Spybot and VNCviewer), and various Microsoft applications.

So, we ran the Analyze option and after about 20 minutes had a long list displayed in the report pane. "What the hell?" we thought, "we'll let 'er rip!" and hit the Run Cleaner button. Some 20 minutes later CCleaner had recovered over a gigabyte of disk space. This isn't just disk space, it is disk space used by systems stuff that is unneeded or wrong, so getting rid of it is all about performance.

Next we went to the Issues section, which deals with registry problems. After five or six minutes of scanning we got a list of hundreds of unused file extensions, issues with uninstaller references, obsolete software keys, missing shortcuts and ActiveX/Common Object Model problems.

We hit "Fix selected issues," and after saying we wanted the registry backed up, a dialog box asked whether to fix each specific registry issue or go ahead and do all 498 of them! We elected to do them all.

Under Tools, you can select programs to uninstall which is a little irritating because the list produced gives the program's internal name, which is often not the file name. For example, we had a program named 4200. Turns out that is the manager for an HP OfficeJet All-in-one device, but to find out we had to do a search in Windows Explorer (why does HP so overengineer its software?). The tools section also lets you examine and delete startup items.

The final main feature is Options, which lets you select how CCleaner operates: which cookies should be protected from deletion, which custom files should be deleted on each run and which folders should be emptied, as well as advanced options, such as "Only delete files in Windows Temp folder older than 48 hours."

Now, remember that this is just one week after we did a cleanup, so while some of the cruft we found was just from running Windows as usual, a lot of it was stuff that was missed. So is our Windows PC now faster? We think so. It seems more responsive overall and certain operations - such as loading a link in Firefox from a URL in an HTML formatted message in Outlook - definitely is faster. CCleaner is a tool you cannot afford to overlook.