New Ccleaner 3.16 Adds Scheduled Tasks Management

Ccleaner 3.16 adds Scheduled Tasks management and more improvements. The latest version of popular free system utility Ccleaner has been released with two new features and a variety of other changes – the major new feature is the ability to manage (enable, disable or delete) Windows scheduled tasks.

Scheduled Tasks management – To access this new feature, open Ccleaner and select the Tools icon in the left panel then select the Startup tab.

A new Scheduled Tasks tab has been added – select a scheduled task and you can choose to disable, delete or enable it (use with caution as some scheduled tasks may be important for specific programs to work or receive updates) – an example of the new tab is shown below:

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New Scheduled Tasks Management tab

Note on the other two tabs shown: the Windows tab displays programs set to run when your computer starts – basically the same as the Startup tab of Msconfig (the Windows System Configuration Utility) but much easier to view. Likewise, the Internet Explorer tab displays programs set to run when IE starts – basically the same as Manage Addons in IE.

Added Option to close running browsers when cleaning – This is the second new feature. When you clean via the Cleaner tab you are now asked whether you want Ccleaner to close an open browser if you have one running (one question for each running browser).

When you see the question popup, you have to click Yes or No to proceed whereas in the past you just clicked OK to continue regardless. Although this makes sense (cleaning browser history/temp files is one of the main reasons for using Ccleaner) it’s a royal pain for those of us who are used to just clicking OK to ignore the warning – the Yes button is in exactly the same place as the old OK button so, if you just press away as usual, your browser will be closed before you know it – it will take a while to get used to this feature.

Other changes in Ccleaner 3.16 include better History cleaning for Chrome and development versions of Firefox, along with updated compatibility for Windows 8 – not released until October 2012 but many people are already using early Development Preview versions.

Cleaning is added for some extra programs such as Corel VideoStudio and there are improvements to the cleaning of Adobe Acrobat 10.0 etc. RAM usage is reduced on 64-bit systems and there are some small changes to the user interface.

Download Ccleaner – Download Ccleaner Free from Piriform here or download the Portable version (zipped file) that requires no installation from the middle of their Builds page here.

Conclusion

The ability to manage scheduled tasks is a welcome addition to Ccleaner, as are the performance and feature improvements. Note that the program still includes a registry cleaner for the advanced user – although we advise against the use of registry cleaners as a general tune-up tool, if you do need one, we have found Ccleaner to be extremely good.