Palebushman

Thank you for your reply Dave CCleaner and all the enlightening links that you provided. My apologies if I disturbed you having thoughts during a fun day.

Hi everyone, hope you are all safe and well during this pandemic.* Is CCleaner now free from its captors chains, if so can I re-install my 'Pro' version; if not, which version of CCleaner is recommended to prevent the 'selling on' of my cookie database? * Better 6ft away than 6ft under.

What's bad about him being Australian? Some of the best IT brains on this planet come from here. Here is one of my old time favourites, an absolute genius for his young age. https://www.tweakguides.com Since CCleaner, Speccy and Defraggler were taken over, it was the 'hair' that finally made up mind to abandon the MS OS and go with the more mature Linux distro I have now adopted.

Thanks for some really great input and info Andavari and nukecad. The advancements in the world of IT is certainly moving at mind boggling speeds, that's for sure. My hope is that it remains affordable for us all to stay engaged with for a few years yet, especially for those of us who enjoy buying the components to build our own custom PC's. Nice to have heard from you all and you appear to be safe and well too. Will pop back again in a while and let you know how our old friend CCleaner is getting on without its umbilical cord.

You're not wrong there nukecad, about the dust, or the factory installed el-cheapo grey paste under these CPU's and GPU's. With our without home air conditioning, that grey stuff has to be replaced with silver or copper based paste a.s.a.p.

Yep, I have just done the same to my installation now hazelnut. Anything home 'phoningish' about CCleaner has been removed and it's working like charm.

No no nukecad, what I was eluding to is that Microsoft may in future, go down the road of providing Azure storage for post Windows 10 OS incarnations. Just as your example of Chromebook, only Microsoft will have complete financial/technical control of whatever data we generate on their locked in OS and devices. No doubt the MS marketing gang will have us believe, this is the way for PC's in the future, including never having to worry about system or Office updates or security issues, as it will all be taken care of in the 'Cloud'. Oh, and no doubt all the future MS hardware will have built-in obsolescence to keep us buying new hardware when the OS gets upgraded to the next rendition. I think it's pretty safe to assume nukecad that the current 'Big 5' world domination by Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Apple, feel it's time for us to be controlled by them......... Completely.

Any 8.1 versions I come across these days login123 get automatically upgraded to 10, there are still many of us that are not comfortable with change, but given a little time to play and familiarise oneself with anything new, usually works out well in the end. But using any computer that is purely cloud based for data storage, does not sit comfortably with most that I know. BTW, love your analogy with your car. Youngsters around my way here believe my column change is the lever for opening the bonnet.

Thank You nukecad and mta, awesome to have you both chime in. All my experience with Win 10 thus far, has been on clients machines, which they allow me to repair for them FOC. (They are mostly pensioners that cannot afford the expensive labour costs of the professionals.) My work on them mainly involves the removal of junk/bloatware and MS Update issues, most hardware issues involve refreshing the baked/hardened CPU and GPU thermal paste and mandatory removal of surface dust from RAM cards, motherboard components and fan blades and radiator grills. Usually finish off my servicing by installing the brilliant Ivo Beltchevs 'Classic Shell' to turn their Widows 10 GUI back to one they are more familiar with. Surprisingly, they all love it too. My favourite uninstaller is 'Geek Uninstaller' and the freeware version is still available from MajorGeeks. As for their Internet surfing protection, I always install Malwarebytes for them too. Thanks for all your tips and info everyone, CCleaner Portable appears to be the 'Go' for now, and a final clean-up with Clear Event Logs.BAT my maintenance work should be a breeze.

Thank You Andavari and Login123, I will definitely give the Portable Zip version a try Andavari and let you know how I get on with it, but Login 123 are you're still sticking with XP! You must be behind one awesome Firewall or maybe you don't cruise in cyberspace through the big onion. I got tickled that many times with my XP it wasn't funny so I had 3 choices. Couldn't afford one, the penguin couldn't train me so I went with 7. Even that is now that is coming to an end too! One thing is for sure, when Windows goes purely 'Cloud' based, I won't be flying with it. Thanks so far guys, hope the rest of the gang chime in when the time zones allow them.

Hi everyone, How are you all keeping? Not quite a year has lapsed, but I recently pondered re-installing a very sadly missed old friend of mine back on to our PC's. Before doing so though, I thought it best to pop back in here first and check out how you 'CC Gurus' are coping with the latest rendition of CCleaner and, has our old friend still got its umbilical cord firmly attached to that gargantuan server in Prague? If you feel your response may jeopardise you in any way, please don't respond, I will understand.

For all those years that I trusted in you and the awesome products you provided, it is now time for me to bid you farewell Piriform. The loss of your independence is one thing, but to have your soul taken over by another, is heart breaking and very sad. Thank You, for working so well during all the years our bond of trust was so strong. Farewell Buddy.

CCleaner Professional v5.44.6575 Options ---> Privacy □ Allow usage data to be shared with 3rd parties for analytics purposes □ Show offers for our other products □ Help improve our other apps by sending usage data to CCleaner The Options ---> Privacy boxes are all checked/ticked by default and appear to produce these 'Cookies to Keep' in the Options ---> Cookies *.ipm-provider.ff.avast.com *.ccleaner.com *.ccleanercloud.com My question is; if these are 'User' Options, why are they checked by default and...... Could the CCleaner code responsible for these entries, be the code that Malwarebytes is reading as a PUP, thereby triggering its blocking process for the CCleaner installation of the automatic update? Needless to say, I most certainly do not agree to check/tick the 'shared with 3rd parties' box, ever.

Thank You Stephen, you are absolutely correct with this tip of yours:- "You may find that disabling the following setting before the update resolves the issue: Ransomware Protection Don't forget to re-enable the setting in Malwarebytes after CCleaner has updated." Your new update v5.44 installed without any problem at all. Naughty MWB

Thanks mta.

My sincere apologies mta, I was not my intention to appear uncivil or rude.

Your link, wombat1st is dated July 19, 2017. Copied from an earlier post in this thread, I wrote the following:- Back in October last year, I was more than a little concerned to see Avast and CCleaner in the same wrapping, mainly because my experiences with the Avast AV program has been far from a happy one. ( To check what had happened with the CCleaner 'take-over' I wrote to Piriform before deciding what to do with CCleaner. Below is part of the email reply that I received from Piriform:- Hi Dave, Thank you for your email. I'm happy to say that Piriform is indeed a British company; we're headquarted in London as you can see on our website here: http://www.piriform.com/about/offices (the 'main US office' notation is due to the fact that we have a few very small satellite offices in the US, like mine, to try to help cover more time zones for support). Please note that while we have joined with Avast's operations, we're still operated independently, and that there's no Avast code in our software, nor do we require the usage of their antivirus software. (We'll be happy to recommend it if someone asks for suggestions about antivirus software, of course, but that's about the extent of it.) The last paragraph is pretty conclusive to me wombat1st. My sincere apologies to you too, if you felt offended by my earlier reply to you, it was not intended. Engagement in that type of behaviour is not permitted in here.

Thanks for your input on this topic Noesis, nukecad and RobertK, very much appreciated. Just as long as CCleaner remains 'Independent' from outside forces, as is mentioned in that email response I posted above, that will be great. I have been using CCleaner since the turn of the century, without any issues at all, which is why I purchased the Pro version. They are a great team at Piriform and I for one would hate to see them swallowed up in any sort of 'hostile' take-over. Had to come back and apologise for leaving out two other contributors to this thread; Stephen Piriform and Noesis. Thank you too guys.

Hi nukecad and RobertK, Back in October last year, I was more than a little concerned to see Avast and CCleaner in the same wrapping, mainly because my experiences with the Avast AV program has been far from a happy one. ( To check what had happened with the CCleaner 'take-over' I wrote to Piriform before deciding what to do with CCleaner. Below is part of the email reply that I received from Piriform:- Hi Dave, Thank you for your email. I'm happy to say that Piriform is indeed a British company; we're headquarted in London as you can see on our website here: http://www.piriform.com/about/offices (the 'main US office' notation is due to the fact that we have a few very small satellite offices in the US, like mine, to try to help cover more time zones for support). Please note that while we have joined with Avast's operations, we're still operated independently, and that there's no Avast code in our software, nor do we require the usage of their antivirus software. (We'll be happy to recommend it if someone asks for suggestions about antivirus software, of course, but that's about the extent of it.) Unfortunately, I don't know of any UK-based cleaning software beyond our own; for instance, I just checked each of the companies listed in this article: https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2371155,00.asp and none of them are in the UK (the article is by no means exhaustive, but I figured it'd serve as a representative sample). In all fairness to the awesome Piriform/CCleaner development team, I suspect all these mysterious 'Tracking' files are really to do with Browser 'Add-ons' etc, rather than anything nefarious.

I'm intrigued Stephen Piriform and RobertK, even after installing the latest release (v5.42) and performing two clean-up runs, here is what I found. Ran CCleaner twice in succession, there were no traces of 'Privacy' files or 'Junk' files. But Before closing CCleaner, I clicked on the CCleaner Professional logo in the top left hand corner to open http://www.ccleaner.com/ccleaner home page, which I arrived at only after being told I was being re-directed after I clicked on the CCleaner Professional logo. I did not click on any area of the very informative CCleaner home page except to close my Firefox browser. Remember that my CCleaner program is still running, so I now click on the 'Run Cleaner' button and only have to wait a few seconds before I am informed that under 'Privacy' 66 tracking file(s) removed and under 'Junk' 2.6MB of unnecessary file(s) removed. Question: Where did the 66 'tracking' files come from; Firefox browser or http://www.ccleaner.com/ccleaner home page? 'Cos I sure did not go anywhere else during this test.

Thanks for bringing this issue up RobertK, I was beginning to think there was something very strange going on too, with my CCleaner Pro v5.41.6446. Your numbers are considerably smaller than those that I have been getting, so much so that the 'tracking files removed' are always well in excess of the 'Junk' files that are removed by my CCleaner Pro v5.41.6446. For example; After cleaning up all the stuff that CCleaner warns me to do (Set to .3 GB) I only browsed two websites and checked my very small email Inbox. Did another run with CCleaner shortly afterwards and got a staggering 3310 tracking files removed against a miserly 241MB's of removed unnecessary files! In view of the type of activity that takes place on my local club Facebook page (which, as club secretary, I reluctantly have to use for communicating with club members) the annoying volume of advertisements that FB insists on bruising my vision with, is kept in check with my uBlock Origin 1.16.0, which does an excellent job of blocking FB's futile adversing efforts. My Malwarebytes PREMIUM is always up to date, and it too is an excellent defence against nasties, although I have to say, I would be very surprised if nasties were hiding in the web pages I choose to visit, so it generally only warns me when I follow links on websites such as Forums. Please Note: Malwarebytes does not produce any warnings about my very many years of visiting Piriform or https://forum.piriform.com/ My Post count is very low 'cos I don't usually have any Piriform issues. Here's hoping that the Techsperts in here, may be able to shed some light on this strange imbalance RobertK, if only to enlighten those of us that do not have their skill level.

Hi kroozer, thanks mate* for your input. In my advanced settings, I have already excluded the two files you have suggested, but I note that you also have 'VSS' checked. Maybe this is what I should to do as well, to prevent the System Volume files from appearing/displaying in the 'Drive Map' area. I will give it a run when I get back to the machine this evening, and then get back to you with the results. Thanks again. * 'scuse the 'Aussie' expression:-)

After defragging my C: drive several times and also performing a couple of 'Boot' time defrags, I still can't get Defraggler to defrag C:System Volume or to get the colour of the blocks to change from red to blue. Trying to defrag 'checked items' only gives me a dialogue box warning me that defrag was aborted. My apologies for hijacking the thread, but it is the only one I can see where a "Defrag' problem appears.

Yes mta, after a little supple investigating, it turns out the missus installed a 'foreign' media player because a file she had got from a friend would not open with Windows Media Player. She then promptly used 'Revo' to uninstall it and thought the program would have removed all the relative orphans as well. But that's another story which I will have to check out on the 'Revo' forum.