[marko]

We've taken some of the most popular freeware cleaning and system tweaking programs and listed them here - these will form part of our search for the best freeware of 2011 so please do vote carefully

[BigB]

CCleaner. What else?

[campart]

JV16 Power Tools. Yes, I know that this is commercial software but from time to time JV (Macecraft) offers his software free. In a similar style to Ashampoo you get an older edition free to encourage you to update to gain additional features. An new descriptor is required for this soft selling mechanism....'Baitware' perhaps?
regards to all, and Happy Christmas and New Year.

[Claw]

I like Glary Utilities ,but CCleaner always seems to have the edge when it comes to safety!!!!

[FreeWareFan]

CCleaner + CCenhancer, just because I don't need to do unneeded pseudooptimizations like registry optimization, defragmentation and cleaning that may cause problems.

[Scottar]

I'm still looking for a good, utilities pack. Tweak Now seems good but I would have to buy it to get the entire package. I use Registry First Aide, an excellent registry fixer.

[FrancisV]

Mz Ultimate Tweaker is also an interesting proposition, especially if you allow the program to make its choices for you. And, that's exactly what I don't really like: I want tot stay (more or less) in charge . By the way, nowadays they call their program "Mz Ultimate Booster" (v.5.1.0)

[FutureShock]

Got to go with CCleaner here.  

My experience is that some caution should be used with any of the softwares of this type. I am working with a rather limited set of experiences however.

I used NCleaner for a while because I liked having shredding capabilities. When the support ended for Ncleaner I was forced to switch to CCleaner, so I picked up Eraser, which gives me the shredding capabilities from the right-click menu. Eraser is a program that looks good and judging from its appearance will have good support. Like all cleaner softwares it can be dangerous as I learned myself. Using the full disc shredding capabilities of the program, I disabled Windows native system restore feature. It did me some doing but I finally got the feature working again thankfully.

Long story short I would say be careful with full disk shredding capabilities. During the process of shredding an entire disc or the empty contents of a disk, the disc is filled with ones and zeros.  When the disk becomes full, Windows begins at erasing system restore files. For a while I used CCleaner's full disk shredding feature without any problems. Eventually it began to give the problems also. So I would really recommend caution here...

I have never used a startup cleaner or registry cleaner function, so I can't say what's in those types of software functions. I would be interested to hear of experiences with these functions in CCleaner or any of the other cleaner programs...