Avast acquires Piriform, the maker of CCleaner and Speccy

[midian182]

It’s been over a year since security software giant Avast purchased rival AVG Technologies for $1.3 billion, bringing its total user numbers to around 400 million. Now, the Czech company has acquired Piriform, the UK-based firm behind popular system-cleaning tool CCleaner.

Both companies announced the deal on their respective websites, but the terms of the acquisition were not revealed. The move cements Avast’s place at the top of the anti-malware industry, where its market share is around 20 percent.

Piriform makes a number of device performance optimization programs, though it’s best known for CCleaner, which is used by 130 million people, including 15 million Android users. In November last year, the company announced that the utility had been downloaded over 2 billion times. Today, a Piriform product is installed over 23 million times each month.

The British firm is also behind other pieces of successful software, such as file recovery program Recuva, system information tool Speccy, and defragger/optimizer Defraggler.

Much like it did with AVG TuneUp when Avast acquired AVG last year, CCleaner will continue to operate as a standalone service - nothing is likely to change for users. The company also offers the Avast Cleanup system optimization utility.

“We see many commonalities between CCleaner and Avast, allowing for great new products for our user bases. Avast and CCleaner are the top two downloaded products on popular download sites. They are both known by advanced users as focused on performance, so we believe there will be a great interest from our CCleaner customers in using Avast security products and vice versa,” said Vince Steckler, CEO of Avast. “In today’s connected world, it’s all about speed and high performance, and with Piriform’s robust technology we can address this need perfectly. We look forward to working with the Piriform team to grow the business together.”

Avast says the Piriform team will become part of the Avast consumer business unit, and report directly to CTO Ondrej Vlcek.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/70213-avast-acquires-piriform-maker-ccleaner-speccy.html

 

[Kibaruk]

I don't understand the whole fuss with CCCleaner, I don't use it and my computer is not falling to pieces

 

[Uncle Al]

I used it for a few weeks until the point I was getting more ads than I was anything else so I dumped it. When it stared out it was extremely good, then they got money hungry so it's nothing more than a spam engine ... what a shame!

 

[Legionnaire]

I don't understand the whole fuss with CCCleaner, I don't use it and my computer is not falling to pieces

It's got some useful features. I love that it allows me to somewhat customize the shell menu (when you right-mouse click something), so you can remove all the trash options added by so many programs. It's also great for clearing up disk space the lazy way. I used to be running off of just one 256 GB SSD for my gaming PC, so this really came in useful at the time. I would perform a clean-up roughly once a month? Often it would clear 2-3 GB.

Another useful feature is the ability to remove all browser-related data--which includes cookies, browse history, download history, temporary files, everything. I haven't used this often, but it's really useful when you need it.

The Registry cleaner is also reliable. Sure, removing 300-400 invalid registries isn't going to do much for your PC, but it can add a mild speed-up when booting into Windows.

I like CCleaner a lot, but I do disable some features (like the constant cookie monitoring?) from the start. Overall I'm very happy with it though. Your PC will run fine without it, but it's like upgrading to Notepad++ when all you've used is Notepad. You can still do everything the old way, but the new way is just slightly easier.

Speccy is also great. It looks and feels lightweight and often gives me the info that I'm looking for. It doesn't go into as much depth as CPU-Z/GPU-Z but it's good enough. I hope the Avast will make sure the products (and future products) retain their quality.

 

[Kenrick]

Ouch. One of my must have installers when Im doing clean install. My dad once asked me how to erase his browsing tracks. Rather than showing him how to do it per browser which he will forget. this was one of the solid the solution.

Like @Legionnaire, I also disable those monitoring services.

 

[OutlawCecil]

Little known fact, if you google "ccleaner builds" there are multiple different types of Ccleaner. I use portable because it doesn't have the cookie monitoring or anything like that. (and I can use it from my USB of course) I am a computer technician and I am a big supporter of ccleaner. I hope nothing changes as I'm NOT a fan of Avast...

 

[Kibaruk]

Avast is quite alright, always in the top AV solutions while not hogging the computer.

I will give CCleaner a new go. I used to have it, back in the 98-xp days but I just had it installed and barely had the need to run it.

 

[psycros]

Wait..I thought it was AVG who acquired Avast..?? Would have sworn that's what I read a while back. In any case, Avast is just as bad as AVG when it comes to including fake apps that are nothing but upsells, but it IS a good antivirus. I'm not fond of Ccleaner going non-freeware, which is almost certainly what will happen. Then again, software like that isn't nearly as important as it was in the 32-bit days..and if you ARE one of those holdous running a 32-bit OS, perhaps on a very old or weak PC, then you DO want something like Ccleaner. (And if you're running 32-bit Windows 10, which shouldn't even exist, then I don't know what to say.) In all truth you could install the very last version before Avast takes it over and be fine forever..the fundamental operation of reg fixing/cleaning software hasn't changed in a decade because the guts of Windows really can't change much without breaking everything. Windows 10 will be remembered as a transitional step between the old Microsoft OS architecture and whatever they replace it with. Hopefully they will dump the registry altogether and ship the Windows successor with a 32-bit Windows emulator that can talk to the host OS's DirectX (or whatever their using to talk to hardware at that time).