HDCleaner — Stay out of my store!

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FREEWARE SPOTLIGHT HDCleaner — Stay out of my store! By Deanna McElveen Today’s featured program is a way for you to stay out of my computer store and
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geekdom, Sly McNasty, Fred, dbalaji, lmacri

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After I ran HDCleaner in the default mode with all of the default settings to clean my computer, using Thunderbird I could no longer view articles from the Epoch Times when I clicked on links in their emails.  Can this be safely fixed?

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HDCleaner looks like an alternate to CCleaner; the latter I have been looking to get rid of for some time.  The one thing I will say for CCleaner is that it never caused an issue with ‘cleaning’ something it shouldn’t have.  What are others’ experiences of HDCleaner?

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HDCleaner repeatedly crashed on my computer. I would run it repeatedly and it would occasionally remain long enough to get the main screen installed. Then, I would ask it to analyze something and it would crash. I tried restarting it – nada. I tried rebooting my system. That did not help. I tried the 32-bit version. That crashed repeatedly also.

(Windows 10, 21H2, Build 19044.2130)

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HDCleaner ran without difficulties, although it might be wise to avoid the registry cleaner.

BleachBit is a nice alternative:
https://www.bleachbit.org/

Carpe Diem {with backup and coffee}
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online▸ Win11Pro 22H2.22621.1413 x64 i5-9400 RAM16GB HDD Firefox112.0b3 MicrosoftDefender

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Microfix

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Especially when the winapp2.ini is updated for more carefully selected options.I’ve no need for any other cleaners, it works very well here.

Keep IT Lean, Clean and Mean!

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I got rid of CCleaner years ago.  I found that it didn’t do any better than Windows’ Disk Cleanup after running many, many comparisons.

I downloaded HDCleaner, extracted the zip file to its own folder and ran the executable from there.  It ran without difficulty.  The Registry Cleaner found less than 100 “no file” entries (I use Revo Uninstaller to remove programs), and I went through those to see that it was an accurate representation.

I ran the default settings with no difficulty, no hiccups afterward.  It seems to be a decent utility.

Create a fresh drive image before making system changes/Windows updates, in case you need to start over!

We all have our own reasons for doing the things that we do. We don't all have to do the same things.

Computer Specs

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I’ve known about HDCleaner for a couple of years, but never tried it.  I’m still (mostly) satisfied with CCleaner, but I’ve also found BleachBit to be a good alternative.

The one thing that gives me pause about HDCleaner (as with most tools of this type) is the offer of a registry cleaner, and promotion of it as a way of improving performance and stability.  That may have been true in the era of Windows XP and earlier, but modern Windows installations are stable enough that registry cleaners/defraggers/compressors are of cosmetic value, at best, and risk damage to a machine.

It’s easy enough to ignore the registry tools (and a positive with BleachBit is that the mostly don’t touch registry), but I wish that the developers of HDCleaner (and competing products) would have the guts to remove those features, and stop pretending that they accomplish anything useful.

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Alex5723

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HDCleanerx64 crashed once during my test of it.  The crash occurred when switching from Options to Cleaning.  I did a registry backup with it then could not find anything within HDCleaner that provided the path to where the backup files were written.  Eventually I found them in a \Settings\Backups subdirectory of the HDCleaner.exe home directory.  There is no way to save them anywhere else.  If you move them someplace else, there is no way to navigate to them within the restore function of HDCleaner.  This is a deal breaker for me.  I want a registry backup to be located where it will be included in HD backups (I don’t routinely backup portable apps).

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I abandoned CCleaner for reasons of privacy and security a few years ago. I now use PrivaZer which I definitely find better than CCleaner ever was. For those who want more granular control, the PrivaZer user interface could definitely use a rework, but once the “advanced user” is chosen and you spend some time in a deeper dive, it works a trick. Never had problems with it. (I have registry cleaning turned off! 😉)

I’ll take a look at HDCleaner here soon and see what I think, though. Thanks for the tip!

Win10 Pro x64 22H2, Win10 Home 21H2, Linux Mint + a cat with 'tortitude'.

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down loaded hdcleaner from oldergeeks.  extracted.   would not run.  got message from windows defender stating it was protecting me & would not run  it.  after trying a lot of things, i finally found in  the properties of the hdcleaner.exe a box hat was checked stating it was blocked because it was from another computer.  i unchecked the box.  now it works fine.  i run bitdefender security.  don’t know if that was theproblem or not.

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I use Chrome as default browser yet the software couldn’t find it.
I don’t use/sync OneDrive yet the software found 4600+ entries (72MB) of data in addition to 1400 removable registry entries.

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CCleaner was recommended to me by a computer tech for my new Windows 7 machine I had built in 2012.  CCleaner has always worked great for me on Win 7 even when I use the registry cleanup occasionally to clean out items leftover after uninstalling a program.  CCleaner gives you the option to save the registry entries in a .reg file before it deletes them which is a very good feature.

This applies to my Win 7, but I won’t guarantee it working on the Win 10’s and 11’s.

Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you recognize a mistake as soon as you make it again.

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HDCleaner looks like an interesting, useful piece of software. I wish I could get it to work on my PC, a recent ASUS desktop with Windows 11.

It loads to the dashboard, but once I start any preview operation it crashes almost instantly. (I am running it with Admin privileges.)

Checking properties of the EXE file, I ran the compatibility troubleshooter, which recommended Win 8. It does run with compatibility set to Win 8, but I don’t feel secure in trusting it to make changes to my system.

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Just downloaded and ran HDCleaner on one of our Windows 10 work stations.

The app found 2,444 problems (410 MB) including:

• Browsers (Brave, Firefox. Internet Explorer, and Microsoft Edge) – 668 Problems (14.4 MB),
• System (Temporary Files and Windows Log Files) – 1,755 Problems (395 MB),
• Plugins (MS OneDrive) – 21 Problems (153 KB), and
• Registry – 202 Problems

Despite all of the “Problems” that HDCleaner detected the computer is working well.

Our standard practice is to clean up our machines using CCleaner Custom Clean and HP’s Performance Tune-up Check (System File Checker, Empty Recycle Bin, and Clean Web-browsers history, cookies, and cache) periodically. We avoid the other tools available in CCleaner.

When we run Western Digital’s Dash Board on the computer’s C drive, a 2000.4 GB SSD, it reports that the drive’s health is Normal and has:

• 1714.8 GB Free,
• 284.6 GB Used,
• 0.6 GB Unallocated, and
• 0.4 GB Other.

Our approach to managing our PC’s is – if it isn’t broke don’t fix it – and we are concerned that HDCleaner may be to aggressive when it comes to “cleaning up” our systems.

In other words, do we run a chance of damaging our systems by “excessive” cleaning?

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dbalaji

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Thanks for the recommendation. I have wanted to get rid of CCleaner – it works great, but is not free for commercial use. Unlike some people above, I would often go to CCleaner just for the Registry cleaning. I have read that it “should” no longer be necessary, but I found Registry Cleaning to help Win10 machines that are exhibiting strange behavior. It is sort of a last ditch effort before reloading.

I do have a question. I was unable to find any information the HDCleaner website about licensing. Is it licensed for home and commercial use?

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Deanna McElveen you are so very right with HDCleaner.
Kurt Zimmerman has many nice programs, but some manual reading is never wasted.
Sometimes is changing setting immediately, and that’s unhandy when one is hasty.

CCleaner is phoning home and tracks you. The portable version is rather okay and easy to stop

* _ the metaverse is poisonous _ *

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HDCleaner looks like another CCleaner want-to-be. Trash. A couple of years ago I dropped CCleaner and tried BleachBit and have never looked back.   www.bleachbit.org

 

 

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Alex5723

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I’m very lucky I had a recent backup of my O.S. drive because, after running HDCleaner, my computer was pretty much set to defaults for everything.

I had lost all bookmarks, extensions, and tabs in browsers. All desktop settings including any shortcuts for documents, folders, and program shortcuts that run directly and don’t go through an installation procedure. When I tried to run Thunderbird, I discovered all my e-mail accounts, folders, and e-mail no longer existed. Lucky I had configured Thunderbird to use a different drive for my e-mail.

I ended up swapping to my Backup SSD and booting from that. Then taking a half a day to get Thunderbird working correctly again.

You might want to be careful and make sure you have a backup of all your data before using HDCleaner.

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Charlie

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Every time I tried to use HDCleaner windows shut it down.

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I’m still using HDCleaner with the latest update, v2.040 (64-bit), with no issues.

Create a fresh drive image before making system changes/Windows updates, in case you need to start over!

We all have our own reasons for doing the things that we do. We don't all have to do the same things.

Computer Specs

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I downloaded and tried HDCleaner today, after using CCleaner for many years as my go-to cleanup tool. It looks like HDCleaner may be a little more comprehensive, but I need to run some tests to compare the two better. I do like the fact that HDCleaner does not nag you to buy the pro version.

Like many people, I use my browser keeping a large number of web pages active in browser tabs. After I did the cleanup of browser cache, I had to hit the F5 key to refresh most of the web pages. Makes sense when one thinks about it.

A good find and a good reason to go back and look at previous AskWoody issues.

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geekdom, satrow

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