cleaner

There are more disk-cleaning utilities available online than you can shake a memory stick at. They range in price from totally free to double digits, and in performance from excellent to lousy. We looked at a good one, Moo0 DiskCleaner. It's fast, flexible, and can run at startup or whenever you like. You can customize its function as well as its look. It supports some 130 targets, including temporary data, browser caches, and private data.

The Moo0 installation wizard offered to install a free autocomplete search tool as well, but we opted just to install DiskCleaner, which opened when … Read more

Wise Registry Cleaner Free Portable cleans, defragments, and optimizes the Windows Registry. It can create automatic backups and run at scheduled times. Since it's wise to clean your disks and system before modifying the registry, it's designed to work closely with Wise Disk Cleaner, another free app from the same developer. However, you can also use the Windows tool or another disk cleaning utility prior to running Wise Registry Cleaner.

At first run, Wise Registry Cleaner wisely suggests backing up the Windows Registry and offers to do it automatically. We agreed and selected both a System Restore Point … Read more

Wise Disk Cleaner Portable is one of the better freeware disk cleaners we've tried, portable or not. It not only cleans up your disk drives by deleting junk files, temporary files, and other dross, but also defragments and optimizes disk drives and can even recover deleted files in many cases. The program scans and analyzes your system and recommends specific actions, such as whether or not to defragment certain disks. It offers a lot of user-selectable options, too, such as the ability to deselect any file from a comprehensive view and to designate specific "junk" folders.

Wise … Read more

We're constantly installing and uninstalling the programs that we review for Download.com, and we're sure you can imagine the mess that this creates on our computer: files, icons, and menu items that are left behind, and lots and lots of registry errors. Fortunately, there's a wide variety of registry cleaners that can tidy things up for us. Argente - Registry Cleaner is one such program. We can't say that there's anything about it that really sets it apart from the crowd, but it does an adequate job as far as we can tell.

The … Read more

Moo0 DiskCleaner Portable is free, completely portable, nicely designed, and efficient at its task, which is to centralize the cleaning of your browser caches, cookies, temporary Windows files, and other resource hogs. It's very easy to use, thanks to its simple but effective layout and minimal steps.

We downloaded and extracted Moo0 DiskCleaner to a desktop folder. It's a portable application that needs no installation but runs as soon as you click it, so it can go just about anywhere, including USB drives and other portable devices; it's also a good choice for scheduling automatic cleanups. We … Read more

People who hate housework will soon have two more robots to handle the chores.

iRobot this week will unveil the Scooba 230 floor washer and the next-generation Roomba 700 series of vacuums.

iRobot already has a line of Scooba floor washers, but the company is touting the Scooba 230 as a leaner cleaner. At 3.5 inches high and 6.5 inches wide, the 230 is geared to squeeze into tight places, such as underneath furniture and around bathroom fixtures. The 230 holds enough cleaning fluid to take care of 150 square feet of space in one session, iRobot said.… Read more

Nobody likes hoovering. It's an enormous chore, but sadly, until they invent non-crumbling cookies we're stuck with it. If running a vacuum cleaner 'round the place is doing your back and head in, you'll like the Foki shoe--a concept product that lets you "shoe-ver" your house.

Foki is a vacuum cleaner concept developed by Indonesian industrial designer Adika Titut Triyugo that definitely does not suck--even though it does. Don your housecoat and pinafore, put your hair up in rollers, and step into your Foki shoes to see what we mean.

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Attention all slobs: for this week's giveaway, we've got the Mint automatic floor cleaner that some people like to refer to as a robot. The Mint has a sophisticated NorthStar navigation system that allows it to navigate a room and get around obstacles, like chair and table legs, while picking up dust and nastier stuff. The company calls the system "indoor GPS."

CNET blogger Timothy Hornyak liked the Mint's simplicity, silent operation, and said it worked well as a light cleaner. Mint can clean hard floors with the included reusable microfiber cloths or disposable wet … Read more

Windows' built-in Disk Cleanup tool does a pretty good job, but it's designed to be as easy and harmless as possible, and many users prefer a third-party tool. Disk Cleaner is a free, open-source, standalone hard-disk cleaning utility that's designed to be fast and easy to use yet thorough in its operation.

We ran the Windows Disk Cleanup tool before running Disk Cleaner to better gauge Disk Cleaner's supposed advantages. Amazingly, the Windows utility quit working during the cleanup process, despite a robust system that was fairly clean to begin with. We then ran Disk Cleaner, which … Read more