SafeClean Utilities are designed to be easy to use and to understand. However, to maximize the efficiency, you should know a bit about why the program exists and how it works.
Most Windows programs need to use some forms of temporary files to store temporary information. E.g. WinZIP extracts a ZIP file to the Windows Temp folder before calling the Setup application. In most cases, these temporary files are cleaned by their creators, but in many situations, they are left in your hard drive.
You are surfing Internet and have a lot of fun. But you are not aware that all information about where you have been are saved in your local hard drive. Also web pages that you have visited are stored locally in order to increase loading speed next time you surf.
You download a lot of shareware programs from Internet, install and test. After a few days, you feel that you don't like it. So you uninstall the program and think the program is now completely gone. In most cases, it is true, but not always. Some programs create new files after the installation, and the uninstall-program is not aware of it.
To clean up these things manually is time-consuming and boring. SafeClean Utilities are designed to help you do the task without lifting a finger.
Internally, SafeClean Utilities distinguish between scanners and cleaners. Scanners detect things to clean, and cleaners clean them. In version 3.0, four scanners and two cleaners are implemented and there will be more in future versions.
Following scanners are implemented in SafeClean Utilities
Disk Scanner scans and detects garbage files and folders in your hard drive. It is based on rules that you can define. A rule is something like "Files that match *.tmp" or "All files in folders with names that match *temp*". There are some predefined rules that will detect most of common garbage files. You can customize the cleaning rules to find and clean files as you wish.
Track Scanner scans history files of your activities in Windows. It also detects temporary files and history logs created when you surf Internet.
Shortcuts Scanner detects broken shortcuts in your Start Menu and Desktop. You may have some shortcut links pointed to files or folders that do not exist.
Orphan Program Scanner detects orphan data files that are left by some uninstall programs. When a program has been uninstalled, some files may not be deleted. These are data files created by the software after the installation. Orphan Program Scanner checked subfolders under the "program files" folder that don't contain useful files like *.exe *.dll *.hlp etc.
Note: Since the search criteria of Orphan Program Scanner is fairly simple, the resulted files is not always safe to clean. That is the reason that the scanner is disabled by default. To activate the scanner, you need to manually edit the cleaning job.
SafeClean Utilities are able to clean:
For normal files and folders, you can choose one of four ways to clean:
"Delete only" will delete all the selected files without saving any copies of them. This is the fastest method but does not allow you to "undo" when something goes wrong.
"ZIP & delete" will save all the selected files to a compressed
ZIP file before deleting them. If any program has problem to run after the
cleaning, you can use the "Restore Wizard" to restore all the files. Please note that compressing may be slow in some older computers.
"Move" will move all the selected files to a selected folder and no files will be deleted. SafeClean can help you to restore these files if it is necessary. Please remember to delete these files when everything works since they take as much places as they did before cleaning. You can use the "Clear Log" feature
in the "Restore Wizard" to help you to delete these files.
For beginners, it is recommended to choose "ZIP & delete" or "Move" the files. These operations are revertible and you can use the Restore Wizard to put the files back. If you send the files to the Recycle Bin, you can use Windows Explorer to restore the files. E.g. double-click at the "Recycle Bin" icon in your desktop, then select files you wish to restore and choose from the "File" menu then "Restore".
ZIP files and moved files in the default Backup folder will be automatically removed after 14 days when you start SafeClean Utilities again. You can change the default value in the "Options"->"Misc. Settings".
Track Information will be cleaned by a separate Track Remover.
Besides the system cleaning, there is also a companion disk space manager that helps you find out how your disk space is used and which folders take most place.