Portable SCleaner (formerly Portable Windows System Cleaner)

Portable SCleaner is a tiny and portable freebie designed to tidy up the computer by removing unnecessary files, uninstalling software apps, and shredding files to make them unrecoverable.

Wrapped up in a plain and clear interface, the app sports an intuitive set of options that can be tweaked by any type of users, regardless of their previous experience with cleaning and optimization programs.

As there is no setup pack involved, you can extract the program files to a custom directory on the hard disk and just click the EXE to run.

An alternative is to save Portable SCleaner to a USB drive or other mass storage device to run it on any PC without prior installers.

The main application window holds five buttons dedicated to system cleaning, app uninstalling, file wiping, configuration and product information, respectively.

The system cleaning components remove web browser traces such as history and cookies, along with temporary Internet files and the Windows page file. Its behavior can be manipulated from the settings are into making Portable SCleaner clean up files automatically on system startup and shutdown. Plus, it can disable Internet Explorer autocomplete as well as take into account an exception list with file types defined by the user.

The software uninstallation module loads a list with all identified programs, together with their publisher, version and estimated size. There's nothing special about it really, since its functionality stops after running the default uninstaller (e.g. cannot detect and remove leftover files).

Finally, the file shredder is capable of wiping multiple files and directories at once, and lets users drag and drop the items in the window. It supports three deletion methods: normal, overwrite and Gutmann (35 passes, highly secure).

Operations are performed quickly in general, while Portable SCleaner uses low CPU and RAM, so its impact on computer performance is minimal. There were no issues throughout our evaluation. However, the utility sports just standard settings and has an outdated interface.