I really wish the same ancient, outdated news would stop being rehashed and repeated year after year. CCleaner is not some fly-by-night "we can make it better than new" program from some off-the-wall startup out of some backstreet garage in North Korea or China. And Piriform and now Avast is not some shady back-alley company either. CCleaner has been around for over 15 years. Does it really make sense it would remain so popular if it was constantly causing "serious issues" that forced its users (and there are millions and millions of us) to reinstall our operating systems?
Not all registry cleaners are the same. And not all are snake oil remedies.
That Microsoft article may have been updated in April 2018, but that same
verbatim warning extracted from it was originally created way back in XP days, if not before. And just like rogue security programs back then, there were some wonderall system "optimizers" that did more harm than good that, sadly gave all cleaning programs a bad name that has
unjustly stuck.
Between me and several trusted colleagues, I am confident I am not exaggerating when I say we have used CCleaner's registry cleaner 1000s of times on many 100s of computers and never, not once ever had it brick a system that force a reinstall of the OS. At worse, a simple reboot was all that was needed to make all good again.
Is
Comodo some fly-by-night company that makes programs that haphazardly destroys operating systems?
What about
AVG?
Norton Utilities?
What about driver cleaners? Don't pretend for a second they only purge file remnants from drives. This is especially true of graphics driver cleaners. They dig into the Registry too.
How about the often recommended Revo Uninstaller?
What about "tweaker" programs like the often recommended Winaero?
If they walk like a duck, and quack like a duck... . Why not ban them too?
What does, "
Microsoft cannot guarantee" have to do with anything? Microsoft cannot guarantee
any 3rd party app, driver, add-on, or hardware device will not trash the OS. They can't even guarantee one of their own updates won't trash the OS.
Would it better to just let users use Regedit? Windows own registry editor that (1) makes changes in real-time and (2) NEVER EVER offers to make a backup and (3) doesn't even have a backup feature (only the vague export/import options)?
I am NOT suggesting everyone go out and start using a Registry cleaner. The fact is, and this is especially true with Windows 10, the Registry rarely, if ever, "needs" cleaning. But just because something is not needed, that does NOT mean using it will break Windows. And it especially does not suggest it will force users to reinstall their operating systems.
CCleaner is staying in my toolbag and I will continue to use and recommend it when I feel it can be of use. And FTR, CCleaner's Registry cleaner excels at resolving issues where the user is trying to install a different brand graphics card (replacing NVIDIA with AMD or vice versa) and the driver install constantly fails even after using the applicable NVIDIA or AMD graphics removal program. I'm just saying.