CCEnhancer

Editors' review

by: Download.com Staff on August 03, 2010

The Web Atom's CCleaner Enhancer adds support for more than 270 programs to CCleaner, the popular system and Registry-cleaning tool from Piriform. CCleaner Enhancer adds rules and definitions sourced from the Piriform Support Forum and other online resources to CCleaner's built-in WinApp2.ini system. When you run CCleaner again, the new programs are automatically included and ready to be selected for scanning.

We downloaded and ran the latest version of CCleaner prior to installing CCleaner Enhancer, to better gauge the additional effects. CCleaner Enhancer first asks to check for updates, which is usually wise. We ran CCleaner's cleaning tool again, and it turned up a few hundred kilobytes of persistent files that it had missed in the run prior to installing CCleaner Enhancer; it wasn't much in disk capacity, but it's a definite boost in the program's weed-whacking ability. Next we ran the Registry tool, and this time the enhancements were more obvious, with a couple dozen ActiveX/COM issues, missing shared DLLs, and a few more Registry artifacts the first pass had missed. In total, it fixed 53 additional Registry issues, not counting items deselected, most of which were inconsequential. We rebooted and ran each tool again, with no surprises, which is what we hoped to find; nothing was missed, and nothing unexpected happened.

CCleaner Enhancer is freeware, and it adds clearly visible functionality to software that already has some things going for it. It's just the beginning, of course; as creative developers add capabilities to CCleaner, tools like Cleaner Enhancer will make them available to you.