He writes troubleshooting content and is the General Manager of Lifewire.

If youve done any kind of search for a free PC or computer cleaner then youve likely encountered many that were anything but free.

Gratis Cleaner Download Even Though

Sadly, its become increasingly common to advertise that a registry or other PC cleaner program is free to download even though the all-important cleaning part will cost you.

How these companies get away with that sort of practice is beyond belief.

Completely free PC cleaner tools are available from many companies and developers and weve put together a list of the very best to choose from in our article List of the Best Free Registry Cleaners.

There are no shareware, trialware, or other for-pay cleaners.

In other words, we do not have any programs that charge a fee of any kind.

You will not have to pay for anything, there are no donations required, the features will not expire after a certain period of time, a product key is not necessary, etc.

However, none of the tools from our list above require you to pay in order to use the PC cleaning features.

Back in the old days there were many programs that billed themselves as registry cleaners and thats pretty much all they did.

However, as registry cleaning became less needed (it never was, really), these programs morphed into system cleaners with the ability to do a lot more than remove unnecessary entries from the Windows Registry.

So what has happened over time is that our list of registry cleaners has become primarily a list of system cleaners, adding many more features than they had ten years prior.

If you want to skip right on to our favorite, check out the 100 freeware CCleaner program that lets you do lots of system cleaning with just a couple clicks of your mouse.

Gratis Cleaner Full Suite That

CCleaner, in particular, is a full suite that includes lots of features in addition to registry cleaning.

It lets you clear your private web browser data like the history and saved passwords, delete temporary program and operating system data, disable programs that startup with Windows, find duplicate files, wipe an entire hard drive, manage browser plugins, see whats filling up all the space on your hard drive, and more.

The scanning may be free but when you get to the cleaning part, youre prompted for a credit card number.

Worse yet, sometimes only the download is free but actually using the program is not.

We are not affiliated with any of the companies in our curated list, nor do we receive any compensation from any of them for promoting their programs.

We have tested each of them personally and, at least as of the date in the piece, each one was completely free to download, scan, and clean your system and registry.

System cleaning (e.g.

Gratis Mac Cleaner