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Avast Now Owns CCleaner After Acquiring Piriform (betanews.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Security firm Avast has acquired software firm Piriform. Not only does the acquired company make CCleaner, but many other solid programs too. In fact, the rest of Piriform's library -- Recuva, Speccy, and Defraggler -- are staples of the Windows freeware community. "CCleaner is a leading brand in the market, used by 130 million people, including 15 million Android users. CCleaner has an extensive and extremely loyal community of tech-savvy users, who need to speed up and optimize their PC and Android experience. Avast will maintain the CCleaner brand of products along with Avast's existing performance optimization products, Avast Cleanup and AVG Tune Up. With the addition of CCleaner, Avast has dramatically expanded its product offerings in the PC and smartphone optimization market reaching customers around the world who demand faster performance," says Avast. Vince Steckler, CEO of Avast explains, "We see many commonalities between CCleaner and Avast, allowing for great new products for our user bases. Avast and CCleaner are the top two downloaded products on popular download sites. They are both known by advanced users as focused on performance, so we believe there will be a great interest from our CCleaner customers in using Avast security products and vice versa. In today's connected world, it's all about speed and high performance, and with Piriform's robust technology we can address this need perfectly. We look forward to working with the Piriform team to grow the business together."
Quick! Download the latest CCleaner, Recuva, and Defraggler versions before craziness happens:
Ccleaner Portable
Defraggler Portable
Recuva Portable
CCleaner was originally named Crap Cleaner, another example of programmers not choosing sensible names.
I haven't had a Windows machine in a while but when I did (Win 95) CCleaner was a must because uninstall programs were sloppy and and most Windows programmers abused the registry.
Windows 9X was a cobbled together mess until Windows 98SE came out. WinXP was better but still required third-party utilities to fix registry issues. With Windows Vista onward, I no longer needed those programs at home. There are two utilities that I do use at work since remote installs or upgrades occasionally go FUBAR on Windows 7.
If a program refuses to uninstall, use the Microsoft Fix-It utility.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/17588/fix-problems-that-block-programs-from-being-installed-or-removed
For Adobe Reader or Acrobat, use the Cleaner Tool.
http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/acrobatcleaner.html
I install CCleaner on PCs all the time and tell people to run it at least once a month. Of course, ever since one of the major version bumps (I think 4.0?) I've had to precede that with a file called "ccleaner_disable_monitoring.reg" so I don't have to go into settings and manually disable the "active monitoring" crap that the program then warns you and "ARE YOU SURE?!?!?!111" smacks you for trying to turn off. I used to install Avast on everything too since it was free and didn't slow the machines down as much as other options, but now I have to un-check a bunch of boxes in the installer and every new iteration and they keep adding useless "modules" that annoy the crap out of everyone, so as of Windows 10 I just tell people Windows Defender is fine and leave it at that.
It'll be interesting to see how they intend to modify their products. Also, when did AVG become a re-skinned Avast? That was surprising.