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"Avast just announced that the company has acquired the software company Piriform, best known for the software program CCleaner for Windows.
Piriform's flagship product is CCleaner, a temporary file cleaner and traces remover for Windows. The company has created other respectable programs such as Speccy, a hardware inventory software, Defraggler, a file defragmentation program, and Recuva, a file recovery application." - via Ghacks
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Avast Acquires Piriform, Makers of CCleaner
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(1)
Either I'm dead or my watch has stopped.
-- Groucho Marx's last words
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 19 2017, @08:35PM (2 children)
Just download a free antivirus livecd and scan your system with that.
Options include but are not limited to:
AVG:
https://www.avg.com/en-us/rescue-cd-business-edition [avg.com]
https://www.avg.com/en-us/download.prd-arl [avg.com]
Avira:
https://www.avira.com/en/download/product/avira-rescue-system [avira.com]
Bitdefender:
http://download.bitdefender.com/rescue_cd/ [bitdefender.com]
Comodo:
https://www.comodo.com/business-security/network-protection/rescue-disk.php [comodo.com]
Dr. Web:
https://free.drweb.com/aid_admin/ [drweb.com]
F-Secure:
ftp://ftp.f-secure.com/anti-virus/tools/Rescue%20CD/ [f-secure.com]
https://www.f-secure.com/en/web/labs_global/tools-beta [f-secure.com]
Kaspersky:
http://support.kaspersky.com/viruses/rescuedisk?level=2 [kaspersky.com]
http://rescuedisk.kaspersky-labs.com/rescuedisk/updatable/kav_rescue_10.iso [kaspersky-labs.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Lagg on Wednesday July 19 2017, @10:51PM
I haven't ran anything Windows doesn't already have since 7 for viruses and spyware, stopped running anything but Spybot S&D (Before it sucked) back in XP. Ccleaner isn't for malware, it's to clean up shit that Windows userspace and third party stuff likes to drop like registry entries that make nonsensical menu entries, logs, temp files, core dumps, etc.
Sadly, i've never found anything that works as well as it does. Nor anything that has a self-contained zip file that you can download, run, then delete. Was pretty valuable for a chunk of my field technician stint.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 5, Informative) by Arik on Thursday July 20 2017, @01:00AM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 4, Informative) by nobu_the_bard on Wednesday July 19 2017, @08:46PM (1 child)
I tried Avast's "web shield" thing but, at the time at least, it did this by injecting its own certificates into everything HTTPS, which broke Outlook and every internal website, while also covering up issues with websites that had bad certificates but weren't on their blacklist. Wasn't impressed...
(Score: 3, Informative) by Pax on Wednesday July 19 2017, @10:12PM
No.... that'd be "Avast SafeZone"browser and not the Web shield. Web shield is fine as it guards against drive by downloads ,infected pages etc
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 19 2017, @09:11PM
And the business goes pear-shaped. :)
(Score: 2) by buswolley on Wednesday July 19 2017, @09:13PM (2 children)
CCleaner was useful at one time. But now? ugg.
subicular junctures
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 19 2017, @09:17PM
I know. It happens to everything I eat.
(Score: 1) by purple_cobra on Thursday July 20 2017, @04:58PM
System Ninja [singularlabs.com] is worth a try if you want to avoid CCleaner now. It's a bit slow - possibly to help you stretch the wallet muscles and buy a licence - but it has worked for me. It's the same company that produce CCEnhancer, an addon that expands the scope of CCleaner.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 19 2017, @09:17PM (3 children)
Speccy is that thing that crashes the drive firmware of common WD 2TB external disks. "Respectable" my ass.
(Score: 2) by chromas on Wednesday July 19 2017, @10:31PM (1 child)
Sounds like a bug in the firmware. Software shouldn't be able to do that (except maybe the driver I s'pose, but not really).
(Score: 2) by Arik on Thursday July 20 2017, @12:58AM
The driver should only be able to do that if it's considered a feature. I suppose there are some cases where a crash might be preferred to the alternative.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tibman on Thursday July 20 2017, @01:56AM
I actually like speccy. Not sure why you would blame Speccy for polling a drive when Western Digital actually wrote the driver that crashed.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Wednesday July 19 2017, @10:37PM (5 children)
I gotta abandon Linux and spend my days developing on Windows. Look at the money to be had for so little effort! They apparently get a non-zero number of idiots to give them $24.95 for a "pro" version of their defrag util when Windows has shipped with a perfectly servicable defrag since forever now. And what do you want to bet their "util" is nothing but a flashy front end for the same Microsoft functionality? Or buy all their trivial little utils for $39.95! What a bargain!
I just asked Google and yup, THEY STILL SELL NORTON UTILS. It is like the 1990s called, you can apparently milk this stuff forever!
(Score: 2) by Arik on Wednesday July 19 2017, @11:01PM
Well they've shipped a defragger since DOS 6. It was IIRC the old PCTools Defrag they bought, and noticeably inferior to Norton, but that was for 16 bit FAT too. I suspect (hope!) that the NT OS and FS got a new defrag written for it at some point.
I'm guessing a fair number of people that buy this simply don't realize they already have a defrag, but some may get it for expanded options or a friendlier UI.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 19 2017, @11:04PM (2 children)
I'm not sure about newer Windows, but the built-in defrag for XP was shit. Was worth using an alternative, that said, I'm not sure what you get out of the pro version of Defraggler that isn't in the free one. The free version still does its main job of de-fragmenting a drive perfectly well.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 20 2017, @04:42AM (1 child)
Not a lot has changed,
Couple of months back I had to look at a 'slow' Laptop running Win 7 which had 47GB fragmented files out of 146GB used on a 1TB drive...so much for automatic defrag, which was on. One boot disk c/w external defrag program (Auslogics) and several hours later, laptop back to running 'normally'.
I've seen a Win 10 desktop with close on 200GB fragmented files by its own reckoning, but as I refuse point blank to have anything to do with Win ≥ 8, pointed the owner in the direction of defraggler and disk defrag free and told them 'good luck'.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 20 2017, @09:23PM
UltraDefrag is GPL'd. They ask for donations. http://ultradefrag.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 20 2017, @02:23AM
It's even more amusing when you factor in that windows has a task that defrags the system when it sits idle in case drives are fragmented, unless people manually remove those disks will never be so fragmented as to require running defrag manually...
(Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Thursday July 20 2017, @03:49AM (1 child)
I like CCleaner. It has helped me save a lot of space in my office where space is limited. It also cleans registry etc., a feature I like. Avast offers same features but charges a lot for it. With this news, I am afraid a cheap bastard like me will have to hunt for something suitable once again.
(Score: 4, Funny) by fustakrakich on Thursday July 20 2017, @03:58AM
I like CCleaner. It has helped me save a lot of space in my office where space is limited.
It told you to get rid of the couch, right?
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..