Caution, this happened to me: KCleaner deleted everything on the drive, the only warning was no warning at all, just that it found 4GB of data … I negligently did not scroll to INSPECT what I EXPECTED to see that the entire drive had been marked for deletion, and I just clicked to proceed, presuming it fond crap like tons of old Windows updates and stuff – nope, Windows, Programs, Users, all deleted, ouch!
I do not think the programmer knows to INSPECT what the program EXPECTS in the resulting list of matching files, just presuming that whatever is found matches the look-up, like sending the dog to fetch our newspaper, and not checking if it brought the neighbor’s newspaper, I suppose – there does not seem to be an internal results-audit function in the programming.
I also never had a problem before – or since – but now I SCROLL the results myself to check just in case it selected good things.
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Here’s how I use it now:
– I do NOT use the [ Automatic Mode ] [ Start ] – I consider it blind and dangerous.
Instead, I select:
– Options, Expert Mode = Ctrl E
– Options, Setting = Ctrl S
– [ √ ] Expert mode by default ( shows results before deleting )
– UNCHECK [ ] … Installer cache, or we will NOT be able to delete and upgrade the relevant installed programs,
– [ Save ] to exit options and go to the main program window,
– [ Simulate] ( scans and shows results )
– wait . . . then inspect results by scrolling
Keep reading, we’re not done, here’s where we have to INSPECT what we EXPECT:
BUG –> for me, it pauses on every single empty SD-style card socket, saying there’s no disk in the drive ( Duh! ), asking if I want to continue, which is weird because it seems to ONLY CLEAN DRIVE C: anyway, and I can’t seem to ‘aim’ KCleaner at backup drives that I WANT to clean, so I just hit [ Continue ] and move on It displayed NO itemization of [ Recycle Bin ], and when asking it to [ Open containing folder ], it brought me to the KCleaner program folder, NOT the recycle bin, oops! Again it complained that it can’t read the SD-style empty sockets It warned that it can’t delete browser cache files, telling me to close the browser and retry, even though I unselected everything BUT the MHAudio dumps, apparently it wanted to delete everything I had unchecked anyway <– BUG
I terminated the program in FREE Sysinternals Process Explorer.
So, NO success for me today.
Note: as you can see, I ONLY use the FREE program features. The paid-for features offer to facilitate updating to newer versions, which I always do manually for all my programs anyway.
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Conclusions:
It’s a useful tool under strict and controlled circumstances, such as clean rebooting, making restore points, and backing up to image restore files, nothing else running, perhaps in safe-boot mode, and after careful inspection of the results list, keep a task manager open in case we want to kill it quickly, but it’s not smarter than the user.
Recommendations for improvement:
– fix the BUGs as noted,
– allow us to ‘aim’ it at any drive or directory-as-a-drive,
– offer to change options when manually unselecting items of groups in the results list.
Thanks for letting us explore this and share.
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