Alternatives for CCleaner and uTorrent

O

OpenSource Ghost

Limp Gawd
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I don't like wher CCleaner and uTorrent development is heading. Both are becoming more like spyware, especially uTorrent. I have to tweak them inside-out, add firewall rules and block domains to prevent them from sending telemetry. Are there "clean" alternatives to either of them that are just as good? I need a cleaner that can read clean everything CCleaner can clean and read WinApp2.ini files to perform custom cleaning. For torrent software I need something that is light and is just as configurable as uTorrent, but without spyware-ish add-ons like TronTV and DLive that are now part of uTorrent.
 
Westwood

Westwood

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auntjemima said:
Some of us don't live in America. Some don't want to have to load steam for every bloody game they want to play. Some aren't interested in cat fingers.
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Decko87 said:
Streaming services are getting worse than cable, wouldn't shock me if it really takes off
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I just thought there were..."other" ways. Thought torrenting was out of date. No idea what it is, but I thought that Plex thing was all the rage.

Brings back a few memories, heh.
 
M

mvmiller12

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Westwood said:
I just thought there were..."other" ways. Thought torrenting was out of date. No idea what it is, but I thought that Plex thing was all the rage.

Brings back a few memories, heh.
Click to expand...

Plex isn't very suitable as "another way."

1) If you are running the Plex Server, you still have to acquire the media on it somehow

2) Plex only supports a limited number of client accounts. Unless you want to bundle a bunch of people up under those limited accounts (because you CAN have multiple people streaming from the same account at the same time), it's not gonna be a great experience for anyone.

3) If there is any transcoding that needs to be done, the owner's Plex server is doing it. The CPU load can really add up if you have more than a few people using it at the same time that need transcodes done. Not everyone has a Threadripper sitting around doing Plex duty. My experience is MOST Plex servers are run in the background on a user's PC or a spare (and generally older/low end) PC

4) Plex servers are privately owned, so you have to know someone with one that trusts you enough to give you his or her password to sign in to their server (or, come over to your house to personally enter it)

I personally run a Plex Server - it initially started with just my media and I got it for easy media streaming to my bedroom TVs and for when I travel. But I have some friends that would loan out movies and anime to people and sometimes not get them back - and on top of that, they like to travel and used to take a few different disks with them that would sometimes get lost or damaged. So we merged all of our media together and they have accounts on my Plex Server. They benefit because they don't lose media anymore. I benefit by having more stuff to watch. All of the costs are mine to bear (storage, internet, electrical, hardware, etc.), but I am a hobbyist nerd. My Plex server is set up on a Ryzen 3900 on a Crosshair VI Hero with 32G of ECC RAM and a 10G NIC connected to 48TB of storage via iSCSI and to the internet with FiOS GB service. My setup is in the minority, I assure you :)

Edit to add: These limitations are probably a fair chunk of why Plex tends to fly under the eyes of The Powers That Be.
 
R

RogueTrip

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Microsoft storage sense and disk cleanup are built in. Or try bleachbit to replace ccleaner.
 
Armenius

Armenius

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Westwood said:
I just thought there were..."other" ways. Thought torrenting was out of date. No idea what it is, but I thought that Plex thing was all the rage.

Brings back a few memories, heh.
Click to expand...
Torrenting is used for more than pirating. Recently for me it was the best way to acquire the RE4HD mod at 20+GB.
 
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Eulogy

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mvmiller12 said:
2) Plex only supports a limited number of client accounts. Unless you want to bundle a bunch of people up under those limited accounts (because you CAN have multiple people streaming from the same account at the same time), it's not gonna be a great experience for anyone.

3) If there is any transcoding that needs to be done, the owner's Plex server is doing it. The CPU load can really add up if you have more than a few people using it at the same time that need transcodes done. Not everyone has a Threadripper sitting around doing Plex duty. My experience is MOST Plex servers are run in the background on a user's PC or a spare (and generally older/low end) PC

4) Plex servers are privately owned, so you have to know someone with one that trusts you enough to give you his or her password to sign in to their server (or, come over to your house to personally enter it)

I personally run a Plex Server - it initially started with just my media and I got it for easy media streaming to my bedroom TVs and for when I travel. But I have some friends that would loan out movies and anime to people and sometimes not get them back - and on top of that, they like to travel and used to take a few different disks with them that would sometimes get lost or damaged. So we merged all of our media together and they have accounts on my Plex Server. They benefit because they don't lose media anymore. I benefit by having more stuff to watch. All of the costs are mine to bear (storage, internet, electrical, hardware, etc.), but I am a hobbyist nerd. My Plex server is set up on a Ryzen 3900 on a Crosshair VI Hero with 32G of ECC RAM and a 10G NIC connected to 48TB of storage via iSCSI and to the internet with FiOS GB service. My setup is in the minority, I assure you :)

Edit to add: These limitations are probably a fair chunk of why Plex tends to fly under the eyes of The Powers That Be.
Click to expand...
Yikes this one has a lot of wrong information.
2) isn't inherently true. If you have the hardware, you can support unlimited users, there's no soft limit. I've had 30 streams going simultaneously.
3) Anyone doing CPU transcoding is doing it "wrong". Offload it to GPU and you can easily support a lot more, even a low end GPU.
4) There's zero password sharing at all. The server admin sends out an invite to an email address or plex username. From there the user signs in (on their local device, no need to "go" anywhere) and accepts the request, then has access to that library.

You're setup is hardly in the "minority" haha. Outside of the FIOS internet, that's a pretty small setup - many plex servers are running on enterprise or enterprise-adjacent hardware with more RAM and much, much more storage than that. Mine, for example, is 128GB of RAM, 40G NIC, and 218TB of storage... and I still feel like a small fish compared to quite a few other plex admins I know.
 
TheSlySyl

TheSlySyl

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Armenius said:
Torrenting is used for more than pirating. Recently for me it was the best way to acquire the RE4HD mod at 20+GB.
Click to expand...
RE4HD is SO DAMN GOOD!

Westwood said:
I just thought there were..."other" ways. Thought torrenting was out of date. No idea what it is, but I thought that Plex thing was all the rage.
Click to expand...

Anyway, Plex and Torrenting are best buds. They're as tight as can be. Especially with stuff like Sonarr, radarr, etc. Automates the whole thing.
 
pendragon1

pendragon1

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i havent bothered with clean up tools in years, windows handle that fine, imo, and ill also suggest qbittorrent. it seems to work good, no crap in it either.
 
M

mvmiller12

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Eulogy said:
Yikes this one has a lot of wrong information.
2) isn't inherently true. If you have the hardware, you can support unlimited users, there's no soft limit. I've had 30 streams going simultaneously.
3) Anyone doing CPU transcoding is doing it "wrong". Offload it to GPU and you can easily support a lot more, even a low end GPU.
4) There's zero password sharing at all. The server admin sends out an invite to an email address or plex username. From there the user signs in (on their local device, no need to "go" anywhere) and accepts the request, then has access to that library.

You're setup is hardly in the "minority" haha. Outside of the FIOS internet, that's a pretty small setup - many plex servers are running on enterprise or enterprise-adjacent hardware with more RAM and much, much more storage than that. Mine, for example, is 128GB of RAM, 40G NIC, and 218TB of storage... and I still feel like a small fish compared to quite a few other plex admins I know.
Click to expand...

2) I didn't say anything about the number of simultaneous streams - I said ACCOUNTS (meaning Home Users), and Plex has NEVER let me have more than 16 total (including mine as the Plex Administrator). Now a server can have up to 99 SHARES, but those only work if you send invites to other registered Plex users. On top of them having to register an account with Plex, unless they have their very own Plex Pass those users may have to also buy a client activation to watch on certain devices. Fuck that. Plex does not need to know who I invite to watch my media - it's bad enough the get they get the client IP Address, but that's a necessary evil for the service to even function.

3) Hardware encoding is only officially supported on Intel CPUs via QuickSync or nVidia GPUs. I'm unlikely to ever again buy an Intel CPU and will definitely NEVER buy an nVidia GPU as both companies have especially shitty business practices that I will not support. AMD GPUs CAN work, but are not supported, and that system has an R7 260X in it. Even if it WERE officially supported, video card encoding looks like shit. Plex even tells you on their hardware acceleration support page. It's especially bad on DVD content of which I have a fair bit. As far as CPU encodes are concerned, I've had 3 simultaneous 4K to 1080p transcodes simultaneously (as there are only 3 of us in my friend group with 4K TVs including myself) and the Ryzen 9 3900X did not break a sweat doing it. Mind you, Plex is running on a Windows 11 Pro instance under ProxMox on this machine, with another VM running pfSense for routing duties. The actual storage machine hosting the iSCSI connection is an old Dell PowerEdge R515 that I rescued from the dumpster and the 48TB is the available storage for my media. That 48TB is mirrored to another 48TB in an MD1200 and because I am using Windows 11 to run the Plex Server and the iSCSI appears as dedicated attached storage, I have BackBlaze doing the cloud backup thing on top of that for a cool $7/month. I have over the last 15 years of backing up my media lost everything TWICE. I learned the backup mantra with a lot of tears. I am NOT rich and it took me a while to save up the $2000 for those 16 8TB drives.

4) Pretty much addressed under 2.

And I never said I had the UBER Plex set up, I said that MOST users are on much smaller setups such as Synology boxes. The Plex Reddit has informal polls asking about this periodically and by far the lions share of Plex users are much smaller fry than either of us. Think of it like this: Being a Millionaire does not mean there are not a lot of Billionaires out there, and being a Millionaire, still places you in the top 1.1% of the world's population controlling 46% of the world's total wealth.
 
WhoBeDaPlaya

WhoBeDaPlaya

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qBittorrent is fine and I do use it quite a bit, but still prefer good old uTorrent 2.2.1
 
HumanBias

HumanBias

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People buy a PC for +$1000
Feel entitled to illegally download $50 games.
Double standards are interesting, but not very useful.
 
pendragon1

pendragon1

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HumanBias said:
People buy a PC for +$1000
Feel entitled to illegally download $50 games.
Double standards are interesting, but not very useful.
Click to expand...
yeah and?
they should release demos so i can try before i buy and i wont have to pirate. no, refunding isnt the same...
double standards for what?
 
GoldenTiger

GoldenTiger

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Executioner said:
I agree. I miss the days of game developers giving you shareware to try first before you buy.
Click to expand...
They used to, before they found out letting people try 1/3 or more of their game free and without time limit was bad for business. Games releasing without demos would sell better.
 
pendragon1

pendragon1

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GoldenTiger said:
They used to, before they found out letting people try 1/3 or more of their game free and without time limit was bad for business. Games releasing without demos would sell better.
Click to expand...
but now they have to deal with refunds. just give me a level or 2 hours, ill know if its worth buyin within those.
 
HumanBias

HumanBias

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pendragon1 said:
yeah and?
they should release demos so i can try before i buy and i wont have to pirate. no, refunding isnt the same...
double standards for what?
Click to expand...

Like I said: Entitlement.
I have no desire to hear you try and "rationalize" why companies owe you.
But I find it very telling you have that attitude, it gives a clear insigt into your biases.
 
pendragon1

pendragon1

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HumanBias said:
Like I said: Entitlement.
I have no desire to hear you try and "rationalize" why companies owe you.
But I find it very telling you have that attitude, it gives a clear insigt into your biases.
Click to expand...
riiight
didnt say they owe me anything
goes both ways, noob
what was your old username here? your attitude and trolling seems really familiar...
 
E

Eulogy

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HumanBias said:
Like I said: Entitlement.
I have no desire to hear you try and "rationalize" why companies owe you.
But I find it very telling you have that attitude, it gives a clear insigt into your biases.
Click to expand...
Agreed. Refunds are so quick and easy now. Buy it, play it for an hour (or two I think is the max), then refund if you don't like it enough. I've only done a refund once, but, it was extremely quick and easy to do. There's really no valid excuse to pirate games other than... wanting to pirate.
 
Domingo

Domingo

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Worth noting, you can even get refunds from gray market retailers like CDKeys. Just tell 'em the game doesn't work in your area.
 
GoldenTiger

GoldenTiger

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Eulogy said:
Agreed. Refunds are so quick and easy now. Buy it, play it for an hour (or two I think is the max), then refund if you don't like it enough. I've only done a refund once, but, it was extremely quick and easy to do. There's really no valid excuse to pirate games other than... wanting to pirate.
Click to expand...
Yep. There are also more resources than ever to see a game such as YouTube or twitch in advance of buying, and forums. There's no excuse for pirating, but entitled attitudes. Games are cheaper than ever, too!
 
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Nobu

Nobu

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Discussion of piracy is against the rules (rule 18), iirc, regardless of your stance. Please discuss the topic (utorrent/ccleaner alternatives).
 
D

daglesj

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Glary off the ninite site. Install, do what you need then uninstall. Done.
 
staknhalo

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auntjemima said:
Some of us don't live in America. Some don't want to have to load steam for every bloody game they want to play. Some aren't interested in cat fingers.
Click to expand...

Some of us would literally just download a car (of Linux ISOs) if we could, tell me how!

I still use CCleaner on Windows and just use Download Station on my Synology for torrents (of Linux ISOs), through VPN - NAS is always on anyway, so I don't have to leave the computer on just to download (Linux ISOs)
 
S

SpongeBob

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Once I tried everything for 2 days to fix my Dad's PC. I ran out of options and said screw it run CC cleaner almost as a joke. It worked. I spent 2 days of my life stressing out when some free software could have fixed it. Long story why not just disable CC cleaner on startup? I dunno how it's spyware exactly.
 
Domingo

Domingo

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I was under the impression that the CC = Spyware thing was related to the other software it used to be bundled with. The stuff you're supposed to decline when you initially install it was shady, not necessarily CC itself. It's not like it gets flagged anymore.
 
N

ncjoe

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haven't downloaded it in a while,

Has CC gotten rid of the extra bundled software that was in the installer ?

I had version that was old, before they started adding all the crap and microsoft
would still flag CC as spyware.... got tired of seeing the warning from microsoft
so just deleted CC and speccy (which also was flagged all the time) ...
 
F

Flogger23m

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Qbittorent is what I switched to.

Crap Cleaner is bloated these days, does it have any use anymore? I generally stopped using it a while ago.
 
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