And yet you come back taking comments counter to yours as a personal affront. You are the one who said "once bitten" - now you say you have years experience "using" these products. Then you suggest I am "Promoting them as safe or harmless" when I NEVER said anything such thing!!!!! :shame2:
I am no spring chicken in this regard either - having been an IT technician for 40 plus years (PC tech since the early 90s) hardly suggests my experiences with Registry cleaners in general, and CCleaner specifically is based on "luck". I have no ideal how many computers I have used it on. Many 100s for sure. And over the years, I have run it on my own systems countless times. You cannot suggest it is "luck" that has kept CCleaner from breaking these systems.
Millions and millions of users have run CCleaner on 10s of millions of computers. Where are those broken computers? Why aren't forums flooded with such cases? Why isn't the official Piriform CCleaner Forum full of complaints about CCleaner breaking their computers?
I would sure like to see some examples (or even one at this point) where users ran CCleaner on fully updated and functional computers, and CCleaner broke them. Got any examples suggesting a pattern or trend? No? Typically what you see is users running all sorts of repair programs, scanners for this and that, System Restore, dinking with MSCONFIG and more in an attempt to fix a broken computer - then they run a registry cleaner (typically some magical "optimization tool" that promises to fix the 100s and 100s of "errors" it finds and make your computer run better than new) in the hopes that will "fix everything". CCleaner is NOT a "repair" or "fixit" tool.
The problem is education. But instead of educating, all many want to do is thwart the use and stifle the discussion - keeping users ignorant of the facts. And based on what? Ancient history and a "few" isolated cases? I think that is sad, and counter to the very purpose of these forums.
The problem is also that so many are totally convinced (how I have no clue) that "ALL" Registry cleaners are the same, and so they lump all as evil.
I say this and then I am done here - I would MUCH rather have inexperienced users use CCleaner (which prompts to backup the Registry BEFORE making changes) than have them use Regedit which makes changes in real-time and never prompts to backup the Registry. In fact, it does not even have a backup option, but instead a confusing (for the inexperienced) Export option. And I would MUCH rather they use CCleaner than any other cleaner because (1) it prompts for a backup and (2) it is a very conservative cleaner.
I am no spring chicken in this regard either - having been an IT technician for 40 plus years (PC tech since the early 90s) hardly suggests my experiences with Registry cleaners in general, and CCleaner specifically is based on "luck". I have no ideal how many computers I have used it on. Many 100s for sure. And over the years, I have run it on my own systems countless times. You cannot suggest it is "luck" that has kept CCleaner from breaking these systems.
Millions and millions of users have run CCleaner on 10s of millions of computers. Where are those broken computers? Why aren't forums flooded with such cases? Why isn't the official Piriform CCleaner Forum full of complaints about CCleaner breaking their computers?
I would sure like to see some examples (or even one at this point) where users ran CCleaner on fully updated and functional computers, and CCleaner broke them. Got any examples suggesting a pattern or trend? No? Typically what you see is users running all sorts of repair programs, scanners for this and that, System Restore, dinking with MSCONFIG and more in an attempt to fix a broken computer - then they run a registry cleaner (typically some magical "optimization tool" that promises to fix the 100s and 100s of "errors" it finds and make your computer run better than new) in the hopes that will "fix everything". CCleaner is NOT a "repair" or "fixit" tool.
The problem is education. But instead of educating, all many want to do is thwart the use and stifle the discussion - keeping users ignorant of the facts. And based on what? Ancient history and a "few" isolated cases? I think that is sad, and counter to the very purpose of these forums.
The problem is also that so many are totally convinced (how I have no clue) that "ALL" Registry cleaners are the same, and so they lump all as evil.
I say this and then I am done here - I would MUCH rather have inexperienced users use CCleaner (which prompts to backup the Registry BEFORE making changes) than have them use Regedit which makes changes in real-time and never prompts to backup the Registry. In fact, it does not even have a backup option, but instead a confusing (for the inexperienced) Export option. And I would MUCH rather they use CCleaner than any other cleaner because (1) it prompts for a backup and (2) it is a very conservative cleaner.