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Avast Buys Piriform (CCleaner, Reuva & More)!


Corrine

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Avast, today's largest vendor of security software, has acquired Piriform, a UK-based company that is behind many successful desktop and mobile apps, such as CCleaner, Recuva, Speccy, and Defraggler.

 

The acquisition was announced today in a press release and on the blogs of both companies, but no financial details are currently available.

 

Piriform is a privately held company based in London, UK, founded back in 2004. The company's claim to fame is its CCleaner application, a very popular OS optimization utility with versions for Windows, Mac, and Android.

 

According to Piriform, CCleaner has over 130 million users on desktop and over 15 million users on mobile. In November 2016, Piriform announced that CCleaner had surpassed two billion downloads, making it one of the most popular pieces of software worldwide, with over 23 million downloads each month.

 

More at Avast Buys Piriform, the Company Behind CCleaner and Recuva

 

Avast Press Release: Avast acquires Piriform, maker of CCleaner

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Frankly, I consider this bad news for consumers. My fear is the great "FREE" Piriform products (CCleaner, Speccy and Recuva primarily) will soon no longer be free. I hope I am wrong.

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Frankly, I consider this bad news for consumers. My fear is the great "FREE" Piriform products (CCleaner, Speccy and Recuva primarily) will soon no longer be free. I hope I am wrong.

IMHO: More likely there will be a bare bones "free" version, and a "pro" (or whatever) full featured version.

 

They had/have this with their AV, as a matter of fact, they were the last (that I know of) that offered a free AV version that was compatible with Win 98. (Sometime after 2014 they stopped supporting that version)

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IMHO: More likely there will be a bare bones "free" version, and a "pro" (or whatever) full featured version.

CCleaner already has "free" and "pro" versions. I don't know about the other Piriform products. Edited by Lost
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IMHO: More likely there will be a bare bones "free" version, and a "pro" (or whatever) full featured version.
That's how it is now, though the free versions could hardly be called "bare bones". In general, the free versions are there for home, "non-commercial" use. And the pro versions have auto-updaters and Piriform provided tech support. The pro version of CCleaner has a real-time monitoring component and supports scheduled cleaning, but most users don't need either of those features.

 

I hope I am just being pessimistic but sadly, I have seen too many times where a great free product is ruined in some way or another after it is acquired by another company.

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Archive the last Piriform version, if you are concerned.

 

I run an old version of CCleaner. I don't feel the need to update it monthly as Piriform does.

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I run an old version of CCleaner. I don't feel the need to update it monthly as Piriform does.
If you don't regularly install new programs, there is no need for regular updates. That's why I even have automatic check for updates disabled. But if I make major changes to my computer, I will grab the latest version of CCleaner before running it.
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