Speed Up Your PC? Avast Cleanup Premium Put to the Test!

Last updated on November 18th, 2025 at 10:55 am

Your PC is crawling, Apps take forever to launch. Boot time seems like it’s counted in minutes, not seconds. I’m guessing you have heard of CCleaner? We’ve all at least dabbled with it. I was the same I used CCleaner pretty exclusively for many years. So I thought let’s give Avast Cleanup Premium a try and find out what the rave is all about. Spoiler: I was genuinely surprised.

The Problem I Actually Had

Not only was my laptop running slowly but it was fighting to run at all. I’d bring up from sleep and just … wait. And wait. I probably had 80 gigabytes of junk piled up over two years old installers, browser caches, random detritus from software I had uninstalled forever ago. CCleaner had been doing it, though if I’m totally real? It was like putting a band-aid on a broken leg.

I would clean it out, and I’d get a day of speed boost, then it would be back to the slowness.

That was when I began to wonder if there wasn’t something out there that could do it better.

First Impression: It Feels Different

When I launched Avast Cleanup Premium, the dashboard seemed a lot less scary than I felt it would be. No overwhelming jargon. No “URGENT: 47,000 PROBLEMS FOUND!” scare tactics as some cleaners do. Instead, it actually presented me with a no-nonsense breakdown: disk space you can free up, startup programs that are bogging things down and outdated apps just collecting dust. That direct honesty was a refreshing change right off the bat.

I did the full scan mainly out of curiosity. Here’s the shocker it actually caught things CCleaner doesn’t. I mean leftover registry entries from programs I’d uninstalled, old Windows update files, browser cache the size of a small elephant. We mean 15GB just crossed out and sitting there doing nothing.

The Big Difference: What Really Worked

The first thing I noticed? After the first four it decreased my boot time from ~45 seconds to 28. That’s not transformative, but it is noticeable. Every single morning. That added up.

But here’s what really got my goat: the AI-powered recommendations. Avast doesn’t just clean and call it a day it offers cleaning schedules that work around the way you use your PC. A week later, after allowing it to “learn” my habits (a feature so typical of Lilith that she doesn’t even give it a proper name), I found the thing trying to auto-clean when I had never actually used the computer at those times.

I’d wake up, and it had already done all its maintenance at night. With CCleaner I had to start everything manually always. I underestimated how much the convenience factor would mean.

I was also surprised by the Sleep Mode functionality. It “hibernates” background apps that are gobbling CPU and RAM without your knowledge. My computer was chugging along with like 12 random processes running on startup that I didn’t even know existed. Shutting those off instantly released performance.

Where Avast Got Real With Me

Look, it’s not perfect. Full cleaning mode can be aggressive. I accidentally allowed it to delete some files that I really needed, because I wasn’t paying attention. Thankfully there’s an Undo Center that is built in, so I got them back. That was a relief. I always shoot in Custom mode now and then check what it’s planning to delete before letting it loose.

Too, notifications can be overwhelming if you don’t tune them. It’ll ping you by default about updating, cleaning and optimizing. It took me five minutes at most to unclick that in settings. Small thing, but worth knowing.

And yeah it’s a separate subscription. And if you’re already a paying customer for Avast Antivirus, purchasing Cleanup requires an add-on purchase. That smacked of some cost compared with the more modest expense commanded by CCleaner.

The Real Question: Should You Get It?

Here’s my unvarnished advice: If you are truly hurting for speed on your PC and have invested time in that machine, yes. Avast Cleanup Premium delivers on what it says it will do. It found more garbage than CCleaner, cleaned it up quicker and in all honesty actually kept my system running better long-term due to the auto-everything.

However (here’s the downside), if all you want to do is spend very little and get something that “will do,” CCleaner still works for a whole lot less money. Avast earns the win for its AI scheduling, the more aggressive deep cleaning and features like the Uninstall Simulator (seriously, it’s genius lets you test removing software before doing so).

For people with a slow PC they’ll want set-it-and-forget-it care for? So you are better off with Avast Cleanup Premium. Advertisement You’re paying for convenience, better recommendations and improved results. That’s worth it in my book.

Bottom line: I’m keeping it. My PC had a lot of issues, and I don’t have to think about when to run cleanups now. Just the peace of mind in that alone is kind of priceless when you’re using an older machine.

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