Claude is the Perfect PC Cleaner

Suddenly my cursor was constantly spinning in my 7 year old laptop. I couldn't do any work because it seemed like the PC processor was fully occupied. The challenge was that the issue occurred intermittently. Looking at processes, memory, disk I/O, I couldn't determine the issue. Should I buy the $35 McAfee PC Cleaner? Nah. Claude came to the rescue.

My hypothesis was the obvious one: an aging laptop, overheating, near the end of its life. Time to clean out the dust, maybe repaste the processor, or start shopping. I thought my system was bloated. I fell for the myth that I needed to clean up my storage, my repositories, and whatever other programs were lurking in the dungeon of my PC. I kept getting those "Upgrade" notifications from McAfee — pay me more money to fix your PC.

But before spending a dime, I decided to actually investigate. Since Claude is already inside my PC and can read and write my files, I figured Claude probably knows my system better than any PC-cleaner software on the market.

Here's how it unfolded.

First, Claude checked the processor while the fan was screaming. I expected to see it pinned at 100%. Instead: 7%. The disk was idle, memory was fine. A maxed-out fan with a sleeping CPU is a contradiction — so the "it's overheating" story was already in trouble.

Next, Claude looked at what was actually running. It found a crowd of programs I hadn't expected — Teams, Zoom, a meeting recorder, Adobe, even a second "new" Outlook I didn't know existed — all running invisibly, none in my taskbar, each waking every few seconds and nudging the cursor to "busy." I stopped them from auto-starting and uninstalled what I'd abandoned. A reboot dropped me from 342 running processes to about 250 and freed two gigabytes of memory that a security app had been quietly hoarding. The machine felt lighter.

But hope is not a solution. At this point I hoped I'd solved the problem. I could no longer see the issue, so I concluded we'd fixed it — even as an uneasy feeling nagged that the real problem was still buried somewhere in the bowels of my PC.

Then it happened again. This time Claude diagnosed my PC during the episode instead of after. There it was: Windows Explorer — the program that runs your desktop, taskbar, and file windows — was burning 96% of an entire CPU core, continuously. That single runaway core was enough to spin the fan to full. Heat wasn't the issue; it was a symptom.

But why was Explorer stuck? Claude traced it to one open file window pointed at a folder in my OneDrive. In Windows, cloud services like OneDrive and Google Drive put little status badges on file icons, each powered by an "overlay handler." Windows only honors the first 15. I had 19 — and all seven of my OneDrive handlers were registered twice, thanks to a known re-registration glitch. With OneDrive's duplicates and Google Drive's handlers all fighting for slots, opening any synced folder full of documents sent Explorer into an infinite loop.

The fix took seconds: remove the seven duplicate entries, drop from 19 handlers to 12, and restart Explorer. That runaway core went from 96% to 6%. Fan off. Cursor steady. Calls responsive.

The conclusion

Not only did I save myself $35, but I'm certain McAfee's PC-cleanup software would never have solved my issue. I walked away with a healthy machine that was fundamentally fine all along — sabotaged by seven duplicate registry entries I couldn't see and never would have guessed.

There is no better diagnostic master than Claude. Rather than run an off-the-shelf tool through its standard cleanup routine — which wouldn't have touched my actual problem — Claude diagnosed the issue specific to my machine. It's infinitely smart, and it resolved everything without my having to install a single new program.