GSA Cleandrive 3.52

Overview

Internet is among the best boons that technology has offered and its surfing is done to carry out numerous purposes, be it for professional work, sending mails, shopping, booking tickets, the list is endless. However, internet surfers are not alone while doing such activities as there are other third-parties who are constantly tracking and snooping almost every move they make on the internet. In fact, a big market exists now that cashes in on by tracking internet surfer’s online behavior such as what they normally like to search for, what pages they visit, so on. GSA Cleandrive is the solution to this problem, which helps to remove most of the privacy violations your system gets every day. It deletes all internet traces, recently opened files or even the logs that show which programs you have run recently.

Installation

Installation includes very basic steps and is completed quickly without any issues. Before starting installation, remember to close other opened applications. After that select the setup destination path, program’s shortcut folder, and additional icons (like desktop icon and quick launch icon). In the final step, you can opt to launch Cleandrive as soon as installation finishes. It is supported by these OS: Windows 95/98/Me/2000/XP/2003/Vista/Server 2008/7.

Interface

Graphical Interface of GSA Cleandrive is intuitive, modern and clean. The main window displays a button to carry out Full System Checkup and as the name suggests, it performs checkup of entire system and later lists down the privacy violations which you can choose to remove as well. All the options offered by the program are pretty straightforward like the left panel displays three main categories: System Status, Custom Cleanup, and Change Settings. On viewing these categories and their respective windows, anyone can easily get the idea of their functions.

Pros

GSA Cleandrive is very helpful to remove almost all of the privacy violations that you get every day in your system. For instance, it has the power to remove previously opened files (like the video files played online), delete any internet traces (like the recently visited Websites), and the logs that show what programs recently ran on your system (like the music you played in the media player), or to put in simple words, it removes history of activities and the tracks on your system that could be used to rob your identity. The system’s performance degrades with time as after years of its usage, numerous programs pile up in the system which eventually slow down the system. This award winning antispy software even helps to improve your system speed as it cleanses off unused files and temporary directories of your programs from the system and this results in better speed of the system.
This software displays the overall status of your system’s privacy and with just a single click, you can perform full system cleanup which finds and lists down all the privacy violations found on the system. However, if instead of full system checkup, you want to cleanup only specific areas on the system then you can do ‘Custom Cleanup’ which allows you to cleanup areas such as windows, browsers, messengers, applications and more. Not only this but with ‘Clean Settings’, you can further configure the actions for each process, for example, for Windows you can opt to clean temporary folder, empty recycle bin, clean windows clipboard history and so on. Above all, it performs the cleanup with great speeds and quickly lists down the potential violation threats.

Cons

When the system checkup was completed, the software prompted to cleanup the violations but on doing so, it was found that the software has to be bought to perform cleanup. Moreover, there is only a 30-day free trial version of this software so much privilege cannot be taken from this software until it is bought.

Alternatives

CCleaner and SlimCleaner are very effective in cleaning up and optimizing PCs to ensure their improved performance. CCleaner carries out scans to clean unnecessary files from the hard drive and it also detects installed applications that may have files which are no longer required, such as Google Earth histories. SlimCleaner is a maintenance utility with lot to offer; it scans and removes temporary files, history logs, lists of recently opened documents and other unnecessary elements; has an uninstaller and a shredder that remove files securely, to avoid risk of their restoration.

Conclusion

GSA Cleandrive definitely does its job quite nicely by checking almost all privacy violations on a system and that too very quickly. However, it is a good option for only those who are ready to buy it, since its trial period is small and even in this period, cleanup cannot be performed without paying a price.