Sadly, it’s become increasingly common to advertise that a registry or other PC cleaner program is free to “download” even though the all-important “cleaning” part will cost you. How these companies get away with that sort of practice is beyond belief. Fortunately, among the hundreds you’ll find in a search, there are several very good, completely free PC cleaner tools available.
Where to Get a True Free PC Cleaner
Completely free PC cleaner tools are available from many companies and developers, and we’ve put together a list of the very best to choose from in our Best Free Registry Cleaners list. Only freeware cleaner programs are included in this list. There are no shareware, trialware, or other for-pay cleaners. In other words, we don’t recommend any programs that charge a fee of any kind. You will not have to pay for anything, there are no donations required, the features will not expire after a certain period of time, a product key isn’t necessary, etc.
But I’m Looking for PC Cleaners, Not Registry Cleaners!
Back in the “old days” there were many programs that billed themselves as registry cleaners and that’s pretty much all they did. However, as registry “cleaning” became less needed (it never was, really), these programs morphed into system cleaners with the ability to do a lot more than remove unnecessary entries from the Windows Registry So what has happened over time is that our list of registry cleaners has become primarily a list of system cleaners, adding many more features than they had ten years prior. If you want to skip right on to our favorite, check out the 100 percent freeware CCleaner program that lets you do lots of system cleaning with just a couple clicks of your mouse. CCleaner, in particular, is a full suite that includes lots of features in addition to registry cleaning. It lets you clear your private web browser data like the history and saved passwords, delete temporary program and operating system data, disable programs that start up with Windows, find duplicate files, wipe an entire hard drive, manage browser plugins, see what’s filling up all the space on your hard drive, and more. If you’re not a fan of CCleaner, some similar programs we recommend are Microsoft’s PC Manager, IObit’s Advanced SystemCare Free, and Wise Disk Cleaner. While all three have various tools that make cleaning up your computer a breeze, IObit’s program is a bit more bloated than the other two—it feels heavy and cluttered, and shows annoying pop-ups to try their other software. However, it’s still free to use.
Important Note About Other Free PC & Registry Cleaner Lists
There are certainly other lists of free PC and computer cleaner programs out there but many of them include cleaner tools that, at some point during their download or use, charge you something. The scanning may be free, but when you get to the cleaning part, you’re prompted for a credit card number. Worse yet, sometimes only the “download” is free, but actually using the program is not. It’s all semantics—and it’s not very ethical. We are not affiliated with any of the companies in our curated list, nor do we receive any compensation from any of them for promoting their programs. We have tested each of them personally and, at least as of the date in the piece, each one was completely free to download, scan, and clean your system and registry.
