In the recent CCleaner 5.45 version released by Piriform/Avast, a new active monitoring feature has been introduced. It is almost impossible to disable the Active Monitoring of CCleaner. This has invited angry reactions from the public over the flawed functioning of the ‘Active Monitoring’ feature. Even when you try to disable it via CCleaner Settings > Monitoring, it will commence the monitoring activity again.
Active Monitoring allows CCleaner Free to monitor your installation in the background, for any updates or new releases, so you don’t have to worry about keeping up-to-date. Still, if you prefer CCleaner to not monitor your system, you can turn off Active Monitoring by following the steps outlined above.
Stop CCleaner Active Monitoring feature
While the CCleaner Active Monitoring feature offers a great and easy way to clean up junk files, at times, like this, it can really come across as a major irritant. A simple solution to deal with this situation is to turn off Active Monitoring if you do not prefer CCleaner monitoring your system.
Launch CCleaner and select ‘Options’ from the main screen of the program. Next, choose ‘Monitoring’.
Then, from the following three options listed-
- Enable System Monitoring
- Enable Browser Monitoring
- Enable Active monitoring
Un-check the box marked against ‘Enable Active Monitoring’. Hereafter, CCleaner will not appear in your system tray after closing. But is will start monitoring on computer restart!
There is another thing you need to know. You cannot now close CCleaner using the ‘x’ button. When you click on ‘x’, the program just minimizes itself to the notification area.
You now need to disable Active monitoring via its Settings, disable the CCleaner startup entry using MSCONFIG and then kill the program using the Task Manager.
In response to this, CCleaner has said:
This data is completely anonymous, and through collecting it we can rapidly detect bugs, identify pain points in the UI design and also understand which areas of functionality we should be focusing our time on. Most modern software companies collect anonymous usage data as it is very helpful when prioritising bug fixes and future improvements in the product experience.
You spoke, we listened. Here’s what we’re doing:
We will separate out Active Monitoring (junk cleaning alerts and browser cleaning alerts) and heartbeat (anonymous usage analytics) features in the UI and we will give you the ability to control these individually. You will have the options of enabling all, some or none of these functions, and this functionality will be uniquely controlled from the UI.
We will take this opportunity to rename the Advanced Monitoring features in CCleaner to make their functions clearer.
We will deliver these changes to the software in the coming weeks.
If you are troubled by the constant alert popups from the program, read our article on how to stop or disable CCleaner alert popups.