Is CCleaner Worse Than Having A Dirty Registry… Yes, Yes it is

I am sure that if you use Windows, you have heard or used the widely recommended product CCleaner. However, just this week that piece of software had a malware parasite attached to its latest update.

I don’t usually recommend them for use on newer installs, but if you installed and uninstalled a lot of different software, the registry can become quite a mess.

Uninstalling programs is not necessarily as easy as you may think. The uninstall utility provided by Windows does not thoroughly remove files, and this means that some of them still can be found on your hard drive along with registry entries that the program used in the Windows registry.  These files are JUNK and having them around is often responsible for errors and problems with the speed that your computer conducts its business.

According to Avast to uninstall CCleaner, follow these steps:

1. Click on the Start menu
2. Select Control Panel
3. Select Uninstall a program
4. Double click CCleaner from the list of installed programs, and follow the instructions

Occasionally when you try to remove it from Add or Remove Programs, it does not always work, and something goes wrong causing it to hang during the uninstallation process.

There are a few common situations that might lead to this happening:

• Check your permissions:  To remove some programs you must have administrator privileges.
• The programs uninstall feature for some reason has become corrupted or has been deleted.
• The program was not correctly installed, originally on your computer or it was previously uninstalled (but maybe not entirely).

Don’t get me wrong, if you are going to use a registry cleaner (it is useful in some situations) such as CCleaner just be judicious in your use.

If you use CCleaner and want to keep using it, Avast’s website has the newest release (- the malware) available on their website.

I would recommend that you do a complete anti-virus scan and if you find any trace of the malware then restore from a backup created before 14 August 2017 (the day before the malware was released).