CCleaner Professional Plus 5

Piriform's CCleaner Professional Plus is one of many tune-up utilities capable of giving a heavily used PC a new shot at life. It boasts many system-enhancing features, including a drive-wiping tool, real-time system monitoring, and privacy-protecting tools. Despite its many attractive features, however, license limitations and other issues prevent it from dethroning the Editors' Choice award-winning Iolo System Mechanic.

Plans and Compatibility

Piriform offers three CCleaner plans. The free version is, as you'd expect, the least feature-packed option. It has basic PC-cleaning capabilities, as well as privacy-protection tools that let you delete cookies, passwords, and other related browser files. The $24.95 Professional plan builds on the free option by offering more thorough computer cleaning, real-time system monitoring, automatic history cleaning, and automatic software updates. The top-of-the-line Professional Plus (reviewed here) is a $39.95 application that adds hard drive defragmentation and file recovery, though it's via two bundled apps rather than being built in—more on that in a bit.

Unlike Comodo PC Tuneup$19.99 at Comodo and Iolo System Mechanic, tune-up utilities that let you freshen an unlimited number of PCs, CCleaner Professional Pro offers a single license for your nearly 40 bucks. In the age of the multi-computer household, this license limitation is antiquated—and potentially pricey.

Compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit Windows 10$119.99 at Microsoft, 8, 7, Vista, and XP computers, CCleaner Professional Plus is a lightweight app that downloads and installs quickly. The app's left-side navigation column houses the tools that let you clean either the system files or applications, while the included Registry Cleaner lets you repair the often-troubled Windows registry.

Regardless of the section you need to clean or repair, you begin by initiating a system scan to identify problem areas. After that, you click Run Cleaner or Fix Selected Issues to finish the job. Doing so causes CCleaner Professional Plus to display how much hard drive space it has freed up. A related feature, real-time system monitoring, alerts you when you can save disk space by running CCleaner, which is useful. If your PC is anything like my gunked-up testbed, a cleaning can result in several gigabytes of reclaimed storage. In fact, CCleaner Professional Plus freed enough space for me to install a 2GB PC game that wouldn't previously fit.

Tune-Up Features

Unlike SlimWare Utilities SlimCleaner Plus$29.97 at SlimWare, CCleaner Professional Plus doesn't serve up detailed software descriptions, which is too bad. Many people will simply remove applications without much thought, but those who desire additional program information must visit their search engine of choice if they're using CCleaner. Nor does CCleaner Professional Plus have community-based ratings that help you determine which apps you should keep. I prefer SlimWare's much more informative approach, which helps you decide what should be removed and teaches you about programs' functions, too.

CCleaner Professional Plus lacks an integrated backup and restore tool to safeguard your PC from any negative consequences that may arise as a consequence of cleaning up your PC. Instead, CCleaner is bundled with RecuvaFree at Piriform, a standalone program that lets you resurrect deleted files. I wish it were actually integrated into CCleaner Professional Plus, because the separate app gives the tune-up experience a splintered feel. Likewise, the included Speccy Professional Edition app gives you at-a-glance information about your PC's CPU, Motherboard, RAM, and components, but it isn't baked directly into CCleaner either. I dislike downloading and dealing with these additional apps, but it may not be a big deal to you.

On the upside, you can schedule cleaning times so that CCleaner Professional Plus handles the cleaning and repair tasks at specified times. This isn't an unusual feature—Anvisoft Cloud Booster$23.00 at Anvisoft  and other quality tune-up utilities have this feature, too—but it's a welcome addition. Other useful features include the Startup and Drive-Wiper tools. The former lets you limit the software that launches as your PC boots, thus reducing the computer's boot time. The latter securely overwrites deleted files so that they're very difficult to recover. It's a feature that proves useful when it comes time to get rid of sensitive data.

Performance Improvements

I tested CCleaner Professional Plus's PC-improvement chops by performing two tests—running the Geekbench system performance tool and measuring boot times—before and after running the tune-up utility. I run each test three times and average the results. Before CCleaner applied its magic to my laptop (a 2GHz Intel Core i7 X990 Style-Note notebook with 4GB of RAM, and an 80GB Intel SSD drive), the system achieved a 5,914 Geekbench score and booted in 50.3 seconds.

My testbed's performance improved after I ran CCleaner Professional Plus. The GeekBench score rose to 6,132 (a bit behind SlimCleaner Plus' 6,218 mark) and the boot time decreased to 41.8 seconds (which topped Iolo System Mechanic's 44.2 seconds).

Those numbers are impressive, but they wouldn't mean jack if they didn't translate into user-noticeable improvements—fortunately, they do. After running CCleaner Professional Plus, my testbed opened windows and apps with an extra pep that wasn't present when the machine was junked up. Even the notoriously bloated iTunes felt snappier. Still, Iolo System Mechanic$24.95 at 50% discount and SlimCleaner Plus offer superior all-around performance enhancements that are reflected in both their performance numbers and the responsiveness of the PCs they tune up.

Gets the Job Done

CCleaner Professional Plus delivers respectable performance improvements to PCs, and it also has a good variety of tools to improve your computing experience. Unfortunately, the utility's one-PC license and splintered design elements limit its appeal. Iolo System Mechanic and SlimWare Utilities SlimCleaner are better-rounded choices, however, thanks to their more thorough tune-ups and superior feature sets.