FCleaner Portable for Windows

FCleaner Portable is a fully portable version of FTweak's FCleaner. We looked at FCleaner a while back and found it to be an above-average freeware disk and Registry-cleaning and -optimizing tool. FCleaner is essentially the same program, but with the added advantage of total portability: it requires no installation, so it can be run from a USB drive or similar device on any compatible Windows PC.

FCleaner Portable quickly proved as capable at cleaning out our system's junk as the installed version, so we decided to take a look at the program's other tools, such as the Uninstaller, which offers more options than the Windows Add/Remove Programs tool. For example, FCleaner Portable not only has an Uninstall button but also Repair, Update, Support, About, and Remove Entry controls and a filter entry field that let us type in a program's first few letters to filter the application list. It also shows the path of each individual uninstaller application, a welcome design choice. Surprisingly, it didn't show installation date, last access, or similar entries in the columns, nor could we add them. That's something we'd like to see in the next update, especially the ability to rotate the list by installation date. The Startup Manager let us disable or remove entries; the Tools tab gave quick access to the Windows Security Center, System Restore tool, Task Scheduler, System Information console, and the Command Line interface. Under Options, we could select our browser from a drop-down list, view all its cookies, and select those we wanted to keep, and FCleaner would zap all the others the next time we ran it. The Custom Cleaner is especially interesting. It let us designate a specific location and file types to clean, and even designate file types to exclude, via a simple wizard. One neat little extra is the small but detailed disk information pop-up that appears when you hover the cursor over the program's system tray icon.

With a robust but safe cleaner, uninstaller, and other useful tools, FCleaner Portable is a great tool to have in your keychain drive or PC toolkit, and it's up to daily duty, too.