For 3rd party tools, I use CCleaner but that's it. I think it gets a bum rap by being lumped in with all the other tools, especially Registry Cleaners. It is not like the others.
I personally don't see how we can assume Microsoft can evolve their products into safer products but not the developers of other products. CCleaner has been around for over a decade and IMO, does a great job -
when used properly. I agree completely that there have been some products "in the past" that made unrealistic promises about improving performance and ended up doing more harm than good. But it is my experience that CCleaner was not one of those products, due largely to the fact it is NOT overly aggressive.
But to your question? Is it needed? No.
Windows 10 is NOT XP and users need to accept that we don't need to treat W10 like we did XP. Windows' own Disk Cleanup is an excellent clutter cleaner that is more than capable at keeping our systems (and drives) clean of clutter (old temp files, old Windows, cookies, etc.).
However, one indispensable (for me, anyway) feature of CCleaner's Cleaner is it allows us to select which cookies we want to keep. So, for example, if I want to keep the cookies that hold my login credentials for Sysnative and the other sites I visit regularly, I select those cookies and CCleaner will not delete them. Windows Disk Cleaner will indiscriminately delete them all. Of course it is not hard to enter your username and passwords again should they be deleted. So that CCleaner feature is really a convenience feature and not an absolute necessity.
As for its Registry cleaner, I have used CCleaner's 100s of times over the years on my systems and have never had it break anything.
BUT I never use it, nor do I ever recommend it be used to "fix" a broken Windows. I typically use it after making major updates to my system. For example, after installing and setting up a new system. After upgrading from Windows 7 to Windows 10. After upgrading from Office 2013 to Office 2016. After swapping out a NVIDIA graphics card to an AMD card. And again, only after I ensured everything was working fine first.
Other reasons I like CCleaner's Registry cleaner is it, again, is
not overly aggressive. It does not find 1000s and 1000s of "problems", nor does it then intimidate users into paying for their pro version to clean those "problems" up. It always prompts to backup the Registry before making changes
AND restoring from that backup works! I've tested it.
So I only use CCleaner's Registry cleaner on systems that are new (or have a fresh OS install) and then occasionally after that. That is, I would not use it on a system that is years old and has never been cleaned before.
And in all cases, since dinking with the Registry always entails risks, always, as in every single time, ensure there is a recent
viable backup of all important data before using. I have never needed it, but I would hate to see what happened if, for example, I had a drive failure, power surge, or a power outage in the middle of running the Registry cleaner.
For the record, I would much rather see users run CCleaner's Registry Cleaner than see them dinking around inside the Registry with Regedit (Windows' built in Registry Editor). Changes made with Regedit are done in real-time, are not automatically backed up, and there is no "undo" option.
Still, while a fan myself, I would say if you have any doubts about your ability to fully recover from a catastrophic event, don't do it!
Which are are talking about? Optimizer, ChkDsk?
Yes, those tools too. "Optimize Drives" (called Disk Defragmenter in previous Windows versions) is all we need to keep our hard drives defragmented (automatically by default! :)) and our SSDs optimized. No 3rd party tools needed. Yes, some defrag programs are a little more efficient at reducing fragmentation, but I say those improvements are insignificant. Plus it is important to note as soon as the drive is used again, fragmentation begins again, wiping out that tiny improvement.
Of greater importance to keep fragmentation at bay is to keep a sufficient amount of "free" disk space on the drive - especially the boot drive. And that is a user responsibility, not any tool's or utility's.
And Check Disk is fully capable of analyzing and even repairing many hard disk corruption issues. That said, if the hard drive is still under warranty and chkdsk reports problems it cannot repair, running the drive maker's own disk analysis tool is sometimes useful to persuade their tech support to issue an RMA. It is hard for them to deny there is a problem when their own program identifies issues.
