Window Washer does three different things that can help with the housekeeping of your PC: it clears your Internet history, tidies up after less-than-thorough un-installations and wipes a hard drive completely clean.

The program itself uses a single window to handle all tasks and settings. A simple system clean, using default settings for everything, is a one-click affair, but you can also select specific programs and folders to concentrate attention on. It gets rid of all traces of Internet activity, including cookies and history files.

The second kind of work is to clean files left over after an application has been uninstalled. Not all uninstall routines get rid of all the bits of their parent applications. On the machine we used to test Window Washer, which admittedly is used for reviewing software so has a lot of files installed on and removed from it, we washed over 4,000 items from the hard drive.

A side benefit of this housekeeping is that you gain valuable disk space - we saw over 1.4GB recovered by the wash. The program has a number of predefined ‘wash cycles' aimed at specific applications, but it can also spot files left over from installations on its own.

You should periodically repeat the wash process, to keep your system free of unwanted files and there's a scheduling utility built-in. This can be set to frequencies from every 15 minutes to once-a-day, but you can't set a specific time, such as when you take a food or rest break. A simple wash takes less than half a minute to complete, however, and will run in the background, so it's not as intrusive as, for example, an antivirus scan.

The third of Window Washer's three useful tasks is hard drive cleaning which, in Window Washer terminology, means ‘adding bleach'. If you reformat a hard drive, all you do is remove the markers to the files stored on it; the data is still intact and can be recovered, if you know where to look. The secure way to wipe the drive is to record random patterns of zeros and ones all over the data that makes up each file and to do it several times.

This program enables you to select from a number of different secure deletion standards, including those of the US Department of Defense and the NSA. The more thorough the deletion, the longer it takes, but if you're selling a computer second-hand, you can at least be sure that nothing recoverable is left on it.

If you prize the security of information on your PC, Window Washer is an excellent utility for cleaning up after Web work and software evaluation. It could also save its price in just a single use as a secure hard disk eraser. It's quick and easy to use and simply does what it says it will.