Ncleaner – The App That Tells CCleaner To Take A Hike
Today we will be taking a look at nCleaner. It is a free Windows system cleaning application. This app will let you clean your system, applications, free more disk space, boost your system’s speed and get more stability and privacy protection. All for the low, low price of free…
Who could say no to all of that?
Plus in case you’re wondering how this differs from apps such as CCleaner, read on for a full list of what Ncleaner will do for you….
nCleaner contains the nkProds patented system and application cleaner chock full of over 90 cleaning items. That is enough to keep any geek busy for an evening. These tools include:
- a Registry Cleaner
- a Tweak Manager
- an advanced Startup Manager
- a Junk Finder
- a Free Space Shredder
- a System Resource Monitor
- a System Adviser
- real time system resources monitoring
- full on logging
- advanced Scheduling
- automatic updater
- plug in options
- custom clean
- and advanced statistics
Wow that sure is a mouthful!
So the claim that caught my eye was this:
“nCleaner has the best cleaning ration on the market due to an advance detection algorithm, also providing security and stability. With nCleaner you can free up to 2 GB of unnecessary disk space. nCleaner supports and handles all major Internet browsers including Microsoft Internet Explorer (and all derived browsers like Avast), Mozilla Firefox, Netscape and Opera. It also supports and handles all major Instant Messaging applications like Yahoo Messenger, Windows MSN Messenger, ICQ, AOL and Skype, office applications, and system items.”
Those are some pretty awesome claims, don’t you think?
Let’s put nCleaner to the test on some of the laptops I have in a pile labeled “Where computers go to die…”. I managed to get a machine up and running and more importantly I got someone’s crap filled hard drive going as well. On boot up I saw some crazy icons loading up… But don’t worry I am on a separate network so I won’t be infecting my co-workers (not today anyway).
I jumped right in and downloaded the <900kb file and performed the default Clean in Analyze Mode. You will want to keep the settings at the defaults, so you don’t screw stuff up. After you get a little more comfortable with it deleting files (that cannot be recovered) then you can go back to it (make a backup before you do anything you are not sure of.)
So as you can see, it found all sorts of crap to clean and I let it do its thing and we freed up more than 17 gigz of space. Woot!
Check out some more screen shots of the available options:
What should we clean? I left the choices at their defaults…
Let’s remove garbage from our machine. Old log files, help files, Scan Disk files and loads more. Again I left the defaults as to not get into trouble!
So many damn options. Check out the option to auto clean when a partition drops to a certain percentage of free space.
I have tried loads of these types of applications but nCleaner from the same guys who make cCleaner have a great product here and best of all it is absolutely fricking free for non-commercial use. I have introduced this to several end users and they instantly fell in love. Some of them love the memory cleaning options while others like the ’set it and forget it’ options included.
Do you have a favorite Windows cleaning application? Let us know what you use in the comments.
(By) Karl L. Gechlik is a superhero of the IT industry who wears many hats and changes in telephone booths. Karl mostly uses his powers for good and the occasional hysterical prank. Get your geek on & follow his geeky antics at askTheAdmin.com today.
Exercise caution.
Read the comments given here
http://lifehacker.com/394913/clean-and-optimize-windows-systems-with-ncleaner
I wrote about the dangers of the program but that is if you are deleting everything willy nilly. The defaults do not harm your system… You going in and marking the app to delete system files now that is going to be a system failure! Read this paragraph again and BACKUP and PERFORM THE ANALYZE MODE SCAN FIRST!!!!
“…I jumped right in and downloaded the <900kb file and performed the default Clean in Analyze Mode. You will want to keep the settings at the defaults, so you don’t screw stuff up. After you get a little more comfortable with it deleting files (that cannot be recovered) then you can go back to it (make a backup before you do anything you are not sure of…”
I like CCLeaner because it’s very stable and portable. Looking at feedback for nCleaner it seems to lack both.
>but nCleaner from the same guys who make cCleaner
Am I missing or misunderstooding something? Seems like two totally diferent companies to me.
quote:
“… but nCleaner from the same guys who make cCleaner…”
NKProds (nCleaner) is a different company than Piriform (CCleaner). NKProds is located in Romania, Piriform in the UK…
How can these companies possibly the same?
I like something really simple like CCleaner. So I don’t want to give a try with this guy
I installed nCleaner and the system crashed when I tried to execute it. I tried it twice, and always happened. Windows XP SP2.
What do you mean the system crashed when you tried to run it? It froze up or did you get an error message? I had no problem running this on XP SP2 or 3.
Do you have administrative rights on the box?
Well, if it comes from a superhero (with a cape or without?) then I’ll have to try it. I’ve got a couple of Windows machines lying around that could stand to lose a few pounds.
I’ve always been worried about trying these types of things — thinking they’d delete some critical files.
I will wait for the dust to settle…I will monitor the blogosphere until reviews of the product become more positive
Although nCleaner installs under Windows 2000, it is not supported according to their forums. nCleaner gives you an error that its missing srclient.dll which is a Window XP module to create restore points.
Hello,
My name is Boghiu Andrei from NKProds. I am the Project Manager for nCleaner.
As observed there is no connection between CCleaner and nCleaner rather than the name (we have been using the name nCleaner for almost 3 years now). Also as mentioned there is no connection between the two companies NKPords and Piriform.
Indeed nCleaner does not support Windows 2000, although it will work if you copy srclient.dll from Windows XP.
Hope you continue to use nCleaner and looking forward to releasing a new version that will address some of the problems mentioned here.
I have installed it on my system with Windows XP SP3 and done only the default scans and cleans and my system became unusable and I had to resort to whole rebuild of my system.
I trusted makeuseof.com reviews before, and used it and now I should think twice about reading and using anything mentioned on this blog.
Hey Gunslinger,
Stephen King fan myself. You shouldn’t blast a blog that makes hundreds of contributions to thousands of thankless people on a constant basis. He did warn you to make a backup. As with any heavy duty system cleaning, a backup is a must. I’m pretty sure makeuseof has even done a few articles on backup apps in the past.
Maybe you should think twice about backing up.
Back it all up
I did a registry defrag once (using a software whos name i have forgot.) It blew up my Windows XP System and I had to reistall it. Since then, I am afraid of trying another such cleaning software.
Well I am a die hard fan of ccleaner. I will give a try for ncleaner too just for comparison purpose.Will post my comment after testing ncleaner.
–Chris
Nice! I’ve got a new favorite cleaner.
Yes I got it to and it all good.
nCleaner Beware!
I made the mistake of downloading and doing as described above, it corrupted my dll files among others I an’t name, and I couldn’t even get system restore to operate. Ended up having to re-install XP from the disc, and lost all of my files, since this required formatting the hard drive. This is not for the uninformed, it took me a week to get back to near normal operation of my PC.
Hey, I used this today and had the EXACT same problem, I had to reinstall Windows too, just some advice, you DON’T have to format your hard drive when your reinstalling windows, there should be an option to keep file system in tact, and then you just install windows into another directory, once you have finished that, you simply log into the new O/S, and copy the files from the old one onto the new one, easy as pie.
To all I used nCleaner since it became public with no problem and used on a couple on my work computers which is on a network with no problem and on my home unit as well works great for me.
Now when you start to use programs that delve deeper and deeper into the recesses of your operating system to make it all clean and sparkly you take the risk of breaking your install by taking out things that your OS needs. With this said I use ccleaner and ncleaner for my system but I watch ncleaner like a hawk and use ccleaner when I am just clearing out temp files, and I never put ncleaner on a computer with a user that dosen’t have a full understanding of the in’s and out’s of xp and filesystems in general. There are some options that I use at my own risk with ncleaner.
Hi,
I have been using cCleaner for a couple of years how and really like it. I tried nCleaner when i read this article.It found over 200 registry items cCleaner did not (I ran cCleaner before running ncleaner). I made sure to back up the registry before removing invalid entries with nCleaner, but all was well.
I have had a remarkable improvement in performance since cleaning the registry with nCleaner. I had several erros hapening, and nCleaner appears to have restored default settings.
So I tried the cleaner, too, and all was well with that, too. I didn’t back up anything then, which was foolish I see, from earlier comments.
I tried the system tweak settings, putting everything at the “Suggested” settings. But when I rebooted I couldn’t access the Internet and a couple of programs no longer worked. So I went back into nCleaner and set the tweak settings to default.
Everything is fine now.
I had customized the appearance of my windows, with larger fonts and icons for one thing. All that was reset to default. I also lost some context menu items, such as Send to Desktop (create shortcut). I found out how to restore those earlier today by doing a Google search.
My Media Center app was not working, and it is now. So resetting most things back to default was a good thing, I think. I didn’t lose any files, so that’s good. But my computer is much faster and more responsive now.
So I have a thumbs up for nCleaner. Just listen to the comments about backing things up. Very important!
Thanks, NProds, for making this available. I’ll be watching for a new version that addresses some of these issues.
Warmly,
don