However, Wise’s range of freeware has certainly improved since those early days and they have also cleaned up their act– no more bundled potentially unwanted extras. I admit that I haven’t been overly complimentary toward Wise software in the past, especially when they were bundling the awful ”Ask toolbar”. Anyway, I’ve been using Wise Disk Cleaner (portable) as my default drive cleaner for quite some time now, on my own machines and on clients’ machines, and have found it to be extremely safe and effective. I had heard that CCleaner had moved into the dark side since being acquired by Avast but this was the first time I’d witnessed proof of that firsthand. Personally, I haven’t used CCleaner for years and when I downloaded the free portable version for comparison purposes while compiling this article, the very first thing that happened, on the initial run, was a popup advertising the commercial edition… disappointing: That still holds true today and I guess CCleaner’s reputation for safety is what keeps people using it.

However, I proved through a series of articles back in 2012 that just about any other free drive cleaner does a better job than CCleaner.

For many years CCleaner has been the ubiquitous free drive cleaner, trusted and used by millions of people worldwide.