Deep-clean your hard drive with atomiccleaner3

Atomiccleaner3 is a powerful and comprehensive tool for cleaning junk files, browser histories and assorted other leftovers from your hard drive.

Reviewing this kind of app is usually very easy. Check to see if it gets even close to CCleaner’s abilities, realize that it doesn’t, throw it away. But atomiccleaner is a little different.

The program understands that there’s more to cleaning up Windows than deleting the contents of the TEMP folders and Recycle Bin. It can wipe crash dumps, individual system caches, logs, error reports, prefetch files, downloaded installation files, even junk files within the Windows Installer Cache.

We found options to clean up Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge, Firefox, Chrome and Opera. Again, you’re able to choose exactly what you want to delete in each case: the cache, and/ or history, and/ or cookies, and/ or passwords, and more.

There’s also support for cleaning up "hundreds" of popular applications and games, apparently.

Atomiccleaner3 still doesn’t have as many options as CCleaner, and they’re not always as well-defined. In CCleaner you can choose to delete "Old Prefetch data" (maybe a good idea), in atomiccleaner3 it’s just all "Prefetch files" (probably not).

There are risks with the interface, too. The four cleaning areas -- System, Web Browsers, Games, Programs -- each have two icons, a magnifying glass and a letter "C". Clicking the magnifying glass searches your drive for junk, but clicking the "C" finds and automatically deletes it, without further prompting.

How does atomiccleaner3 compare to CCleaner? We ran the two programs at their default settings on a Windows 10 system: atomiccleaner found 1.4GB to free up, while CCleaner found 1.2GB. This flipped around when we set the packages to maximum clean -- atomiccleaner3 jumped to 1.8GB, CCleaner reached 2GB -- and we suspect CCleaner will win out in most situations. Still, atomiccleaner3 is an interesting product, and worth a look if you like this kind of tool.

Atomiccleaner3 is available now for Windows Vista and later.