14 DAY TRIAL // Computers may lose their nerve from various reasons, but the most common of them include junk files cluttering, temporary files and registry filled with useless files, startup containing leftovers, file fragmentation and duplicate files. All of these contribute to a decrease in the performance of your computer, choking it with useless data.
Of course that the causes leading to a performance drop are multiple and not limited to the above mentioned issues but these are the most common. The Internet provides a myriad of tools perfectly capable of taking care of these matters and many of them come even for free and some are even great for this kind of job.
HackerCleaner is a free tool tailored to clean your PC of unused files and detrimental plugins like BHOs. The moment you launch the application, a nice (although kind of poorly drawn) and very familiar interface will provide access to all the features of the software. It is equipped with a Start button very similar to the one in XP. It shelters all the options allowing you to jump directly to the menu you need instead of navigating through "Back" and "Next" buttons.
The application comes with five different skins for changing its looks. A most unexpected drawing is Romantic and, to be frank, I do not really know what the pink and little hearts have to do with computer maintenance.
The main screen provides details about your computer, such as operating system, CPU power, physical memory. HackerCleaner guessed the CPU and RAM installed right but it failed to recognize the operating system of our test machine (it runs Vista Business Edition and the program displayed Vista Ultimate).
The performance button in the lower right hand side of the window is a Task Manager with fewer options in the sense that all you will get are running processes (together with PID, user, CPU and RAM usage) and overall CPU and RAM usage. Processes cannot be altered in any way.
PC maintenance options include getting rid of files affecting the performance, but it is not limited to this. Temporary files are definitely a pain for every computer user as they are generally buried deep on the hard disk and not too many users know the path.
HackerCleaner comes with an easy way to get rid of user's temporaries, system temps, system DLLs and caches, Internet temporaries and history and BHOs. All you need to do is check the appropriate boxes and start the search. After the process is complete, it is time for cleaning. However, I was disappointed by the way the files were detected and discarded. It happened more than once for the program to refuse to delete a number of files and not to detect all of them.
When it came to the Recycle Bin section, the files could not be removed, no matter what. When accessing "Clean" option, you can choose the software to automatically search and clear garbage or clear all the garbage in the selected list. I went for the second option and also opted for deleting the items instead of moving them to a location on disk or send them to Recycle Bin. After the process was complete all the files disappeared from the list but re-appeared at the next scan.
HackCleaner also covers registry table cleaning. This section of the application will find unused shared DLLs, remove the traces of unsuccessfully installed software, disabled components, URLs, and scan startup list. The great thing is that if something goes wrong, you can revert the registry to the state previous to scanning, as HackCleaner automatically backs up the changes. You can also make a full back up of the registry and save it anywhere on your computer.
Releasing memory for giving new processes a swift launch is HackCleaner's third component. You can set the amount of memory to be released and define the amount of memory expected to be released. Both settings are made by simply dragging by a slider to the desired value. If you want to gain more physical memory, the program can move data available in RAM into page file.
Settings area is crawling with options for making the work with the program easier and more comfortable. Thus you can choose the location for generating any error report, remind you to backup the entire registry before starting cleaning. The location for storing the backup of pending registry items can also be defined by the user anywhere on the disk.
A real-time BHO monitor will keep your computer safe from online threats and the scheduling function will make temporary files and registry table cleaning a fully automated job.
The application has good intentions but it also comes with failures. During our testing, the application crashed a couple of times and failed to clean all detected items.
The Good
Extremely easy to use and with pretty good options.
The Bad
It proved to be unstable on Vista as it stopped working for a couple of times and crashed soon after. Temporary files detection and cleaning did not work each time.
Help menu is almost of no use as there are many spelling mistakes and grammar errors (an instance can be viewed in the splash screen of the application).
Restoring registry from HackCleaner backups is not supported, so if there are any false positives that will mess up your system you'd better not rely on this option of the application.
When exiting the application you are promted with a confirmation dialog, each time this action is taken, though there is an option to remember your choice.
The Truth
The application has good intentions but does not rise to the standards imposed by EasyCleaner and even CCleaner.
We did run into some trouble after cleaning registry with HackCleaner as after the operation was complete some softwares failed to load. And with no possibility of restoring the registry the most convenient choice was re-installing that application.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
