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Comment by pmlnr | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand the question. Maintenance will always be a thing, carried out by humans, cron, or the os itself doesn't really matter.

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Why doesn't MS Windows do the maintenance - CCleaner does things like clean up ancient cache files, remove Windows update files, remove registry entries for software that's no longer installed.

That sort of maintenance seems like it's the result of poor design in an OS that has the hood welded shut.

I actually used ccleaner on Win 10 recently, an MS update had associated loads of files with TWINUI which wasn't installed making things like viewing images impossible. Ccleaner found of the order of thousands of stale entries, removed them and made a backup. It also let me simply check and disable startup programs - I don't think Win 10 has a way to do that in the user UI?

The OS does it by itself. It even includes an application so you can do it yourself if you want which is called "Disk Cleanup".

Just as one data point, the last time I ran Disk Cleanup, it hosed my entire Windows installation. The bug in question was documented as occurring in Vista, but wasn't fixed in Windows 7, and for all I know, still isn't:

http://www.winhelponline.com/blog/serious-disk-cleanup-probl...

I'm admittedly out of the loop, last time I used disk cleanup would have been Win7, I guess MS expanded it to do much more useful work?

On my W10 install, CCleaner usually finds ~1GB more than Disk Cleanup, not even counting browser caches.

Microsoft also has a poor attitude when it comes to being good stewards of their customers' hard disk space:

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/joscon/2012/01/18/can-yo...

No, sorry, you don't get to take up 30 GB of valuable SSD space for some unspecified stuff that I might need later because removing it is "not supported."

I mean, nobody is stopping you from deleting stuff. They're just saying that if you want to do it you're on your own.

As other have said already, Windows does this - CCleaner does it ... better. And also did it before Windows did it.

Plenty of examples of native apps doing something that third-party apps do much better.

You can disable startup programs from task manager in W10. Or msconfig in older versions.

I actually use Autoruns by preference, https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/auto... .

If you type startup or autoruns or similar does Win10 suggest task manager, would never have thought to look there ... will try next time!

> Why doesn't MS Windows do the maintenance - CCleaner does things like clean up ancient cache files, remove Windows update files,

Windows 10 can already do this by default.

> remove registry entries for software that's no longer installed.

Uninstalling old style Windows software is a hard problem that generally can't be done in a foolproof way, without potentially breaking stuff, due to bad legacy design decisions like giving programs free reign to install stuff wherever they want, without a proper application model nor dependency tracking. Therefore, registry cleaners are also prone to break things.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2563254/microsoft-s...

> That sort of maintenance seems like it's the result of poor design in an OS that has the hood welded shut.

That's what UWP solves.

https://np.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/6ifyxq/spotify_for_...

> It also let me simply check and disable startup programs

This is already in the Windows 10 UI.

I think he's referring to the fact that you need a third-party application to perform maintenance, rather than have the functionality supplied in the OS.

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