hi, I've been having a lot of trouble with windows startup & shutdown
(takes a very long time or hangs); also some of my registered programs are
losing their serial #'s and asking for re-register; also USB hubs not
showing up or malfunctioning (latter may be hardware).

i'm thinking of wiping my C drive and doing a clean install, but I want to
try some other options first. I know there's a lot of hype given by
different shareware and utilities about cleaning registries, but I would
like to use something that has a good track record and is dependable.

can anyone give me any pointers?

thanks,

PD

Registry "cleaners" sell themselves by reporting large numbers of "errors"
(which, if they exist, have no effect on the operation of Windows), then
claim to improve the operation of Windows by "fixing" these errors. No one
has ever published a benchmark test that demonstrates the effectiveness of
these fixes. In most cases registry cleaners are perfectly useless.
Occasionally they get it wrong and damage the registry. You can see the
results in these newsgroups.

Summary: Most registry cleaners are snake oil. They are useless at best and
destructive at worst.



--
Peter
Please Reply to Newsgroup for the benefit of others
Requests for assistance by email can not and will not be acknowledged.
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
http://www.microsoft.com/protect


"DayDay" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:O4Ooo.11064$(E-Mail Removed)...
> hi, I've been having a lot of trouble with windows startup & shutdown (takes a
> very long time or hangs); also some of my registered programs are losing their
> serial #'s and asking for re-register; also USB hubs not showing up or
> malfunctioning (latter may be hardware).
>
> i'm thinking of wiping my C drive and doing a clean install, but I want to try
> some other options first. I know there's a lot of hype given by different
> shareware and utilities about cleaning registries, but I would like to use
> something that has a good track record and is dependable.
>
> can anyone give me any pointers?
>
> thanks,
>
> PD
>

DayDay wrote:

> hi, I've been having a lot of trouble with windows startup & shutdown
> (takes a very long time or hangs); also some of my registered programs are
> losing their serial #'s and asking for re-register; also USB hubs not
> showing up or malfunctioning (latter may be hardware).
>
> i'm thinking of wiping my C drive and doing a clean install, but I want to
> try some other options first. I know there's a lot of hype given by
> different shareware and utilities about cleaning registries, but I would
> like to use something that has a good track record and is dependable.


- What is currently wrong or failing with the registry?
- What convinced you that the registry needs to be "cleaned" up?
- What constitutes the "cleaning" actions?
- What do you expect to gain from the cleanup?
- What are you going to do if the registry changes hose over
your computer since a restore may not be possible?
- What is your recovery strategy from the registry changes?


*_Why the uneducated or lazy should never use registry cleaners_*

If YOU are not adept at *manually* editing the registry, don't use a
tool that you don't understand regarding its proposed changes.
Regardless of relinquishing the task to software, YOU are the final
authority in allowing it to make the changes. Any registry cleaner that
does not request for YOU to give permission to make its proposed changes
along with listing each proposed change should be discarded.

Do you have a backup & restore plan in place? When (and not if) the
registry cleaner corrupts your registry and when you can no longer boot
into Windows, just how are you going to restore that OS partition so it
is usable again? Even if you use a registry cleaner that provides for
backups of its changes so you can revert back to the prior state, how
are you going to perform that restore if you cannot boot the OS after
hosing over its registry? A registry cleaner that [automatically]
backups up a copy of the registry before you permit it to make changes
to the registry sounds nice but that feature is only usable if you can
actually load the OS to then run that utility to restore from its
backup. You need something ELSE to ensure you can restore your OS to a
prior state so it is bootable and usable, like an image backup (full or
incremental). If you don't backup then you have deemed your data as
worthless or reproducible.

What about entries in the registry that look to be orphaned under the
current OS load instance but are used under a different OS environment?
You delete what looks orphaned only to find out that they are required
under a different environment.

Say there was an unusually high amount of orphaned entries in your
registry, like 4MB. By deleting the orphaned entries, you would speed
up how long it takes Windows to load the registry's files when it starts
up - by all of maybe 1 second. Oooh, aaah. All that risk of modifying
the registry to save maybe a second, or less, during the Windows
startup. Most folks that clean the registry end up deleting only 10KB,
or less. They are doing nothing to improve their Windows load time.
Since the registry is only read from the memory copy of it, and since
memory is random access, there is no difference to read one byte of the
registry (in memory) from the another byte in the registry (also in
memory). The extra data in memory for orphaned entries has no effect on
the time to retrieve items from the memory copy of the registry because
orphaned entries are never retrieved (if they were, they aren't
orphaned).

Cleaning the registry will NOT improve performance in reading from the
memory copy of the registry. The reduced size of the registry's .dat
files might reduce the load time of Windows by all of a second and
probably much less. And you want to risk the stability of your OS for
inconsequential changes to its registry? The same boobs that get
suckered into these registry cleanup "tools" are the same ones that get
suckered into the memory defragment "tools".

A registry cleaner should only be used if you by yourself can correctly
cleanup the registry. The cleaner is just a tool to automate the same
process but you should know every change that it intends to make and
understand each of those changes. After all, and regardless of the
stagnant expertise that is hard coded into the utility, *YOU* are the
final authority in what registry changes are performed whether you do it
manually or with a utility. If YOU do not understand the proposed
change (which requires the product actually divulge the proposed change
before committing that change), how will you know whether or not to
allow that change?

On 29/09/2010 5:21 PM, DayDay wrote:
> hi, I've been having a lot of trouble with windows startup& shutdown
> (takes a very long time or hangs); also some of my registered programs are
> losing their serial #'s and asking for re-register; also USB hubs not
> showing up or malfunctioning (latter may be hardware).
>
> i'm thinking of wiping my C drive and doing a clean install, but I want to
> try some other options first. I know there's a lot of hype given by
> different shareware and utilities about cleaning registries, but I would
> like to use something that has a good track record and is dependable.
>
> can anyone give me any pointers?
>
> thanks,
>
> PD

Most registry cleaners are useless. However, CCleaner is more than just
a registry cleaner, it is a disk space cleaner too. It's the safest of
the bunch of registry cleaners out there, as it tells you exactly what
it has found and gives you the option of going through with it or not.

Yousuf Khan

On Fri, 08 Oct 2010 16:02:20 -0400, Yousuf Khan
<(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:

> On 29/09/2010 5:21 PM, DayDay wrote:
> > hi, I've been having a lot of trouble with windows startup& shutdown
> > (takes a very long time or hangs); also some of my registered programs are
> > losing their serial #'s and asking for re-register; also USB hubs not
> > showing up or malfunctioning (latter may be hardware).
> >
> > i'm thinking of wiping my C drive and doing a clean install, but I want to
> > try some other options first. I know there's a lot of hype given by
> > different shareware and utilities about cleaning registries, but I would
> > like to use something that has a good track record and is dependable.
> >
> > can anyone give me any pointers?
> >
> > thanks,
> >
> > PD
>
> Most registry cleaners are useless.


Much worse than useless--they are all very dangerous.


> However, CCleaner is more than just
> a registry cleaner, it is a disk space cleaner too.



Yes, and a very good one.


> It's the safest of
> the bunch of registry cleaners out there, as it tells you exactly what
> it has found and gives you the option of going through with it or not.


It's certainly one of the safest, but that doesn't make it safe. And
since, like all of them, it does nothing of any value, and is
extremely risky to use, I strongly recommend *against* using its
registry cleaning functionality.

Here's my standard post on the subject:

Registry cleaning programs are *all* snake oil. Cleaning of the
registry isn't needed and is dangerous. Leave the registry alone and
don't use any registry cleaner. Despite what many people think, and
what vendors of registry cleaning software try to convince you of,
having unused registry entries doesn't really hurt you.

The risk of a serious problem caused by a registry cleaner erroneously
removing an entry you need is far greater than any potential benefit
it may have.

Read http://www.edbott.com/weblog/archives/000643.html

and http://aumha.net/viewtopic.php?t=28099

and also
http://blogs.technet.com/markrussino...t-of-life.aspx

Let me point out that neither I nor anyone else who warns against the
use of registry cleaners has ever said that they always cause
problems. If they always caused problems, they would disappear from
the market almost immediately. Many people have used a registry
cleaner and never had a problem with it.

Rather, the problem with a registry cleaner is that it carries with it
the substantial *risk* of having a problem. And since there is no
benefit to using a registry cleaner, running that risk is a very bad
bargain.

--
Ken Blake, Microsoft MVP (Windows Desktop Experience) since 2003
Please Reply to the Newsgroup

DayDay wrote:
>
> hi, I've been having a lot of trouble with windows startup & shutdown

If you have these problems then the best way to resolve it is to
do a clean start by reformatting your HD and re-installing the OS
and applications. Planning is required to do this most
efficiently.


As to Registry cleaners, although they don't do anything special
to your system apart from keeping it clean and tidy, I am using
Ccleaner and had no problems so far.

However, anybody who says cleaning your registry is going to solve
all your boot problems and all that is simply not intelligent
enough to make such statement.

hth


> (takes a very long time or hangs); also some of my registered programs are
> losing their serial #'s and asking for re-register; also USB hubs not
> showing up or malfunctioning (latter may be hardware).
>
> i'm thinking of wiping my C drive and doing a clean install, but I want to
> try some other options first. I know there's a lot of hype given by
> different shareware and utilities about cleaning registries, but I would
> like to use something that has a good track record and is dependable.
>
> can anyone give me any pointers?
>
> thanks,
>
> PD

"Ken Blake, MVP" wrote:
>

> > Most registry cleaners are useless.
>
> Much worse than useless--they are all very dangerous.
>

Have you tried any registry cleaners? What evidence have you
got? Don't rely on those useless links your fellow MVPs have been
dishing out for the past 10 years or so. HAVE YOU HAD ANY
PRACTICAL EXPERIENCE OF REGISTRY CLEANERS?

Are you the same Ken Blake who hasn't formatted a hard disk since
Windows 95?

Cheng Heng

That is nothing new. I also never had to format my Hard Drive on my working computer
since Windows 95 in 95. If you know and understand how a computer works and you
know what you are doing and understanding it ,then you also might not have to
reformat.
I have reformatted my test machine numerous times but that is a test machine that I
use to test scripts and codes.

--
Peter
Please Reply to Newsgroup for the benefit of others
Requests for assistance by email can not and will not be acknowledged.
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
http://www.microsoft.com/protect


"Cheng Heng" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:(E-Mail Removed)...
>
>
> "Ken Blake, MVP" wrote:
>>
>
>> > Most registry cleaners are useless.
>>
>> Much worse than useless--they are all very dangerous.
>>
>
> Have you tried any registry cleaners? What evidence have you
> got? Don't rely on those useless links your fellow MVPs have been
> dishing out for the past 10 years or so. HAVE YOU HAD ANY
> PRACTICAL EXPERIENCE OF REGISTRY CLEANERS?
>
> Are you the same Ken Blake who hasn't formatted a hard disk since
> Windows 95?