CCEnhancer – extension of CCleaner functionality

The CCEnhancer add-on is an add-on for the popular free CCleaner program, which is designed to clean and optimize your computer. After adding this extension (plugin), support for more than 1000 new applications will be added to the CCleaner program.

After installing the CCEnhancer utility, the capabilities of the CCleaner program for cleaning your computer from unnecessary junk files will be significantly expanded. Thus, CCleaner will be able to perform a more in-depth cleaning of the system, unnecessary files will be removed, and the system registry will be cleaned. As a result, the performance of your computer will be optimized.

CCEnhancer is being developed by a different development team that is not related to Piriform, the creator of CCleaner.

The CCleaner program has a built-in “winapp2.ini” file, which is used to install additional extensions (plugins) that add additional functions to the program. The file “winapp2” prescribes certain rules that guide the program when cleaning the computer from unnecessary data that is created when using specific programs and applications.

The installed CCEnhancer module adds new rules and definitions to this file, which then become available in the CCleaner program. All these rules are taken from the support forum of Piriform, the manufacturer of CCleaner.

For the CCEnhancer module to work, the computer must have the .NET Framework 3.5 installed, which can be downloaded for free from the Microsoft website.

Installing CCEnhancer

After you have downloaded the CCEnhancer application to your computer, unpack the archive containing the application. Then run the application by clicking on the CCEnhancer executable.

After that, a program window will open in which you will need to select a language. Click on the “Setting” menu, in the “Options” tab, in the “Languare” section, select the Russian language.

To install the utility, you will need to click on the “Update” button.

Immediately after that, the add-on will be installed in the CCleaner program.

Next, the “Upgrade Complete” window will open. In this window, click on the “Yes” button to launch CCleaner.

Then the main window of CCleaner will open. Visually, the program has not undergone any changes after installing the CCEnhancer add-in into it. To see the new additional features, open the “Windows” and “Applications” tabs.

Here you will see newly added programs, as well as additional items to the programs already installed by default. Added functions are marked with asterisks after the file name (*). This list will contain only those programs that are currently installed on your computer.

This is what the main window of CCleaner looks like without installing the CCEnhancer add-on. Using the Firefox browser as an example, you can see that a large number of new items have been added to the program, with the help of which it will be possible to more thoroughly clean the system and applications from unnecessary files.

At the location of the CCleaner program, the file “winapp2” has appeared, which allows you to use advanced features for cleaning your computer from unnecessary files.

CCEnhancer update

In order to add new programs installed on the computer to the list, which, in turn, leave unnecessary files on the computer, it is necessary to periodically update the CCEnhancer module. After updating the module, new options will be added to the CCleaner program.

Run the CCEnhancer file, in the window that opens, look at the date of the last update. If a rather long period of time has passed after the update, then you can update the CCEnhancer application by clicking on the “Update” button for this.

After that, the CCEnhancer module will be updated, and new rules and definitions will be added to the winapp2.ini file.

Removing CCEnhancer

If for some reason you need to return to the regular version of CCleaner, you can easily remove the CCEnhancer plug-in from your computer.

Launch the CCEnhancer application and then click on the “Features” menu. Next, click on the “Uninstall updates” context menu item.

Also you can just delete the “winapp2” file from the CCleaner folder. On my computer, the CCleaner program is located in the following location: C: Program Files CCleaner.

After deleting the winapp2.ini file from the CCleaner folder, the CCleaner program will continue to work in its normal, standard mode.

If you remove the CCleaner program from your computer, then the CCEnhancer extension will be removed along with the program.

Next, consider using the CCleaner program after installing the CCEnhancer add-on.

Removing unnecessary files

After starting the CCleaner program, the program opens in the “Cleaning” section. Here you will see that in the tabs “Windows” and “Applications” in the list, many items are already configured by default. Moreover, some items are active, while others are not. These settings are best left unchanged.

In addition to the existing items, new options have been added, which are marked with an asterisk (*). These new options have been added to the program by the CCEnhancer module.

Since all installed programs leave traces on the computer, in this case, the user himself must decide whether to delete specific data or not. Most of this data can be safely disposed of. If you do not understand some points, then you can search for information about this on the Internet.

After selecting the settings for cleaning the system, click on the “Analysis” button. Wait for the process of collecting information about unnecessary files and data to complete. After the analysis is completed, information about how much disk space will be freed up on your computer will be shown.

Next, click on the “Clean” button to remove unnecessary data from the computer.

In the warning window, click on the “OK” button.

Cleaning the system registry

In the main window of the CCleaner program, click on the “Registry” button. By default, all the necessary items are already checked in this tab. To start searching for incorrect and unnecessary entries in the registry, click on the “Search for problems” button.

After the scan is complete, click on the “Fix…” button.

In the window that opens, the program asks whether to save backup copies of the changes made. I recommend that you click on the “Yes” button here, and save copies of the modified registry files in a place convenient for you.

In favor of my recommendation, I will give two arguments: the first is that copies of registry changes take up very little space, and the second is that in case of any problems, you can quickly restore the changed registry branches.

In the open window you can see the problem entries. To remove invalid entries, you can use the “Fix” and “Fix Marked” buttons.

• “Fix” – records will be deleted one by one, you can view information about a specific problem.
• “Fix marked” – all incorrect entries will be deleted immediately.

After cleaning the registry, click on the “Close” button.

Additional features of CCleaner

CCleaner has additional features to optimize your system. With the help of the program, you can remove programs from your computer, remove unnecessary entries from startup, remove system restore ducks, overwrite free disk space.

To access additional functions of the program, you will need to click on the “Service” button. Here are the sections: “Uninstall programs”, “Startup”, “System Restore”, “Erase disks”.

To remove a program, you will first need to enter the “Uninstall programs” section, then you need to select the necessary program in the list, and then click on the “Uninstall” button.

In the “Startup” section, you can adjust the startup of programs that start simultaneously with Windows. In the “Windows” tab, you will see which programs are enabled or disabled in startup.

To change, select the desired entry, and then click on the “Enable” or “Disable” buttons, depending on whether you want to add the program to startup or disable its startup.

To remove an entry from startup, click the “Delete” button.

In the “Context Menu” tab, you can enable, disable, and also remove items from the context menu.

In the “Search for files” section, you can find duplicate files that are on your computer, and then delete the found files if necessary.

From the System Restore section, you can delete previously created system restore points. I do not recommend that you do this, because when working on a computer, very often troubles occur at the most unexpected moment. By having Windows restore points on your computer, you can always restore your computer to working order.

With the “Erase Drives” section, you can clear the free space on your drives to improve your privacy. In this case, the free space on the disk will be overwritten, and it will be impossible to recover previously deleted files, even with the help of specialized programs.

It will be possible to erase only free space or the entire disk. If you overwrite the entire disk, then you will lose all the data that is on this disk.

The following rewriting methods are supported in the program:

• “Simple overwrite (1 pass)”.
• “DOD 5220.22-M (3 passes)”.
• “NSA (7 passes)”.
• “Guttman (35 passes)”.

To overwrite, first choose what exactly you will erase, then choose the erasing method, mark the desired disks, and then click on the “Erase” button.

After clicking on the “Settings” button, you can enter the program settings. Here are the sections “Settings”, “Cookies”, “Inclusions”, “Exclusions”, “Advanced”.

You can change the program settings for yourself if you are not satisfied with the default CCleaner settings.

In the “Cookies” section, you can add cookies to the list for saving. In this case, when cleaning the computer, if the option to delete cookies is enabled in the program settings, these added cookies will not be deleted from the computer.

Using the “Inclusions” and “Exclusions” sections, you can add files, folders and registry branches to the corresponding lists for deletion or, conversely, not deletion from the computer.

Article Conclusions

The program CCleaner has a paid version – CCleaner Professional, which adds advanced features for cleaning and optimizing the system. I compared CCleaner Professional and CCleaner after installing the CCEnhancer module. It turned out that the programs have the same capabilities.

Thus, after installing CCEnhancer in CCleaner, you get a free version of the program that is identical to the paid version of CCleaner Professional.

The CCEnhancer add-on adds additional features to the CCleaner program. After installing the module into the program, there is support for a large number of new applications for more in-depth cleaning and optimization of the computer.