Recommendations for best Registry Cleaner

[All Things Mopar]

Today, with great enthusiasm and quite emphatically, Pegasus
(MVP) laid this on an unsuspecting readership ...

The registry is an indexed database. Having a few hundred
(or a few thousand) orphaned entries, left behind by
incompletely uninstalled applications, makes no difference to
access speed. On the other hand, if the applications are still
installed and active then deleting their registry entries is
probably a bad idea.
whatsoever to access speed

You need to re-read my post. I was talking about crap Windoze puts
in there and /orphaned/ entries left behind by errant apps and
uninstall or update processes. And, while I am not nearly as
knowledgeable as you might be (or would like us to believe), I do
understand the makeup and operation of the Registry. My comments
stand. The Registry can and does get bloated and app crashes, slow
launches, aberrant app behavior, and other problems can be
prevented or greatly minimized by correctly cleaning the Registry.
And, by backing it up to prevent a nuke and reinstall when Windoze
trashes it itself. Had Bill the Gates had his wits about him when
he designed this thing, he would've planned for and executed a
means for preventing all this, but we all know he isn't nearly as
bright as he'd like us to believe.

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

I have never been one to clean the registry, nor do I know the
benefits of doing it, but I am under the impression that it could
make my computer run quicker and better.

Your impression is wrong. You'll get conflicting points of view here, but
this is my advice: Leave the registry alone and don't use a 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 the registry cleaner erroneously
removing an entry you need is far geater than any potential benefit it may
have.

 

[Guest]

Exactly! It is not so much whether it can be done successfully or not, it is
a matter of potential cost versus benefit; the downside risk is huge.

The subject of registry cleaners always seems to cause contention here but
we seem to agree that registry cleaning should NOT be done in any automatic
mode. But by the time a user has figured out the purpose of each of the
so-called "trouble" entries (as indicated by the software) and investigated
whether it is safe to delete/modify, the problem could likely have been
traced from the opposite direction.

 

[POP]

Today, with great enthusiasm and quite emphatically, Pegasus
(MVP) laid this on an unsuspecting readership ...

You need to re-read my post. I was talking about crap
Windoze puts in there and /orphaned/ entries left behind by
errant apps and uninstall or update processes. And, while I
am not nearly as knowledgeable as you might be (or would
like us to believe), I do understand the makeup and
operation of the Registry. My comments stand. The Registry
can and does get bloated and app crashes, slow launches,
aberrant app behavior, and other problems can be prevented
or greatly minimized by correctly cleaning the Registry.
And, by backing it up to prevent a nuke and reinstall when
Windoze trashes it itself. Had Bill the Gates had his wits
about him when he designed this thing, he would've planned
for and executed a means for preventing all this, but we
all know he isn't nearly as bright as he'd like us to
believe.

Very few MVPs will hear you, All. Whatever it is about that MVP
culture, whether it be ignorance or a condition of keeping the
"fancy" title of MVP, they are to this issue as closed minds are
to any issue. I've never fathomed why

And then every once in awhile one will post something overheard
about it being a "database" and the size of the database having
no relation to use of said database, amongst many other things
that have oozed from the ether from them.

Most MVPs are pretty good in their tested areas, but they don't
stick to them, and worse, a few will often respond that the
reason for being so short in their responses is the "time" they
have to invest. Uh, huh. And yet they'll keep on going with a
thread such as this one, firing off excuse after excuse with
little to nothing for any kind of clarifying or verifying
information.
It's like anything else; you have to know what you're buying
or you'll often get what you paid for<g>.

Regards,

Pop
--

 

[POP]

/agree /agree /agree.
I'm looking into replacing M$ XP with:
http://www.ubuntu.com/ at the moment. It has some pretty
good features so far.

And then there are alwayts the flamboyant narcissists such as
this one who run into the shadows as soon as they are confronted
with having to assemble a small piece of code. They make a lot
of noise but nothing is ever left but a smell afterwards.

 

[POP]

And someone who takes your advice, installs Linux, plays
with it for a few months, installs and removes several
programs like a typical Windows user, won't have several
unknown and useless config files spread all over the place?
I'm not saying this will be harmful to the Linux system. It
just uses hard drive space needlessly. It's about as
harmful as most perceived registry bloat problems.

Sometimes even worse when you consider it's the user that created
a lot of that flotilla of crap. BTDT. I won't go to Linux
simply because it does not yet have some drivers I need and I'm
not about to write my own from scratch. I probably could, but
I'm not about to go off on that tangent when MS does it all and
much more efficiently.
If one is good with Linux and a Unix language isn't required on
the job, then it's a pretty simple job to keep an MS os going,
and to hold it secure. Someday it might change, but ... after
all, it's open sourced and can't really be expected to be the be
all that MS has managed to put together.
I'm not saying any of them are good or bad; just voicing what
I see/hear/read. It's a presonal choice for the educated in that
direction, not so for most users though.

Regards,

Pop

 

[POP]

What, no original thoughts, so you just figured you'd post the
same thing again?

 

[POP]

Your impression is wrong.

See, that's the kind of statement gets you guys in so much
trouble. You're obliquely stating there is NEVER (a word which
should NEVER be used, BTW<g>) any reason to use such an app. And
that just isn't true.

You'll get conflicting points of

view here, but this is my advice: Leave the registry alone
and don't use a registry cleaner.

I could live with that, but ...

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.

They can indeed "hurt", and if the right tool, there are good
reasons to use such a tool. Whether a registry cleaner is more
useful than dangerous depends on a lot of things which you guys,
not you in particular, will never bring up or admit even exists.
I've been asking around my circle of acquaintances, about 27
people so far, and have not found one yet who has had a registry
cleaner cause any damage.
I'll agree that not just any tool can be trusted. Same for
anything else, as a matter of fact, ranging from registry
manipulation at install and uninstall time, to registry
manupulation through plain old, everyday appications use.
When you consider the amount of activity going on with the
registry even when you don't install/uninstall anything, it
begins to look like a registry tool might be the least of
anyone's worries. Even some MS apps can corrupt the registry, as
I've found out personally. The list is long.
If anyone is curious, I think it's Sysinternals has a little,
non-registering program (makes no registry entries when it
installs) called regmon which will show you on the fly
what/when/who about all registry changes. If I'm wrong and
that's not Sysinternal's, let me know and I'll fix my misqote,
but I'm about 99% they're hte ones with a decent working one.
The biggest problem newbies et al have is telling what IS and
what is NOT a reliable source of software or programs, especially
with all the freebies floating around, which everyone wants
naturally.
So, if you MVPs in general would like to actually do some
good, get off your arses and go see what's real and what's not in
the world of registry manipulation.
And here's another direction you can take if you really want
to get people off of registry programs: Start educating them
about the Admin Tools. There are very few registry entries
indeed, which cannot be tweaked using an MS supplied app. Only
trouble is, the MS supplied admin tools, don't offer the backing
out protection the other "cleaners" do.

Also, if one is going to crosspost to all creation lke this,
hoping to get a larger audience, for heaven's sake, SET A F'UP!
Then go there to play. Quit wasting bandwidth like this! If
anyone's really interested, following a f'up is no big deal to
them. For MVP's to perpetuate long crossposts to 6 groups like
this is purely assanine, I don't care who started it.

F'ups to public.windowsxp.general.

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

And that is just a pure crock of crap! The risk of an erroneous
registry entry from daily use is, IMO, much more likely.
The same para you wrote above can be used for ANY application,
making it irrelevant. Nearly EVERY app on everyone's computer
has already and is continuing to, make registry changes. Even
e-mail.

Pop
--

 

[Guest]

OK I'm dumbfounded and completely amazed. No one, not even the MVP's have
gotten this issue right. Oh well. Here are the facts. With the advent of
multi CPU units, FSB speeds in excess of 1GHz, CPU's topping 3.5GHz, HDD
spinning out at over 7500RPM's and on and on. The number of useless registry
entries that XP will simply ignore anyway makes a differrence of maybe
microseconds. So little that you won't see any gain what so ever. What
everyone is missing is the fact that registry fragmentation is the real
culprit and is the thing that is responsible for loss of performance. Thank
heavens there is a free and excellent tool that will fix this for you. The
first time you use it you may get a reduction of as much as %10-15 in the
size of the registry. NTRegOpt is what it's called and why not get the
Emergency Recovery Utility NT otherwise known as ERUNT. It'l make a complete
backup of your registry that can be accessed from the recovery console if
needed. So a dirty registry isn't the issue but rather a fragmented one.
Yawn. Such a genious if I do say so myself. LOL LOL. TTFN.

 

[Bob I]

And the reason you can't find it is, because it was removed due to
causing registry problems.

 

[Ron Martell]

I have never been one to clean the registry, nor do I know the benefits
of doing it, but I am under the impression that it could make my
computer run quicker and better.

Any Suggestions?

Thanks in advance!

Chaz

While there are some circumstances where a registry cleaner can be of
signifcant value, these are relatively rare.

In my opinion the major performance impact caused by leftover items in
the registry would be the increased size of the registry, as Windows
loads it into RAM. But it would take a really huge number of
leftover/obsolete/invalid items in order to use up enough RAM to make
any substantive difference. And much of that would probably be
quickly paged out to the pagefile and left there, thereby minimizing
the impact.

I did encounter one situation on my own computer a couple of years
ago, when I had installed Microsoft Visual Studio onto a second hard
drive. The drive failed shortly thereafter, but not until I was
pretty well finished with Visual Studio. Because the drive was gone
I could not uninstall the application and rather than trying to
reinstall it I opted to use a registry cleaner to help sort things
out. It removed over 15,000 registry entries and eliminated pretty
much all of the problems, although I did have to manually set up some
new file associations for some file types that had been associated
with Visual Studio. I did this on an "as and when needed" basis and
it worked out quite well.

I used RegSeeker for that project, and I also use it occasionally on
customer's machines for projects such as de-Nortoning.

Good luck

Ron Martell Duncan B.C. Canada
--
Microsoft MVP (1997 - 2006)
On-Line Help Computer Service
http://onlinehelp.bc.ca

"Anyone who thinks that they are too small to make a difference
has never been in bed with a mosquito."

 

[All Things Mopar]

Today, with great enthusiasm and quite emphatically, POP laid
this on an unsuspecting readership ...

Very few MVPs will hear you, All. Whatever it is about that
MVP culture, whether it be ignorance or a condition of keeping
the "fancy" title of MVP, they are to this issue as closed
minds are to any issue. I've never fathomed why

I know I do a Don Quixote with this stuff. I don't expect the
MVPs to change, they've been bought out by M$. It is the regular
folks that I hope to influence in some positive way with my
intentionally "negative vibes"

And then every once in awhile one will post something
overheard about it being a "database" and the size of the
database having no relation to use of said database, amongst
many other things that have oozed from the ether from them.

I did 10+ years of DBMS programming when I wore the clothes of a
younger man, and it is generally true that any random access DB
is relatively unaffected by "cleaning". However, and this is the
important part, whatever app(s) are randomly accessing their part
of the Registry, seemingly by definition, they must read what
they want sequentially. In my PSP 9 example, all the 5,000
entries left behind were things like the position of all the
tools, dialog boxes, preferences, etc. While PSP got no faster, I
did fix the problem I was having, which was that it refused to
properly associate graphics file extensions. Had I not cleaned
the Registry, a "clean" reinstall would've been immediately
corrupted by the old crap, rendering my effort useless. Been
there, done that, so I know.

Most MVPs are pretty good in their tested areas, but they
don't stick to them, and worse, a few will often respond that
the reason for being so short in their responses is the "time"
they have to invest. Uh, huh. And yet they'll keep on going
with a thread such as this one, firing off excuse after excuse
with little to nothing for any kind of clarifying or verifying
information.

I take nothing away from the technical knowledge of the MVPs, it
is their attitude that pisses me off. M$ hardly does everything
right and everybody knows it. If an MVP cannot in good
consciounse bite the hand that feeds them, at least they could
refrain from such obviously biased - and wrong - assertions

It's like anything else; you have to know what you're
buying
or you'll often get what you paid for<g>.

Yes, and in my reply to the OP, I gave a synopsis of the
precautions one must use whenever mucking around the innards of
an O/S.

 

[All Things Mopar]

Today, with great enthusiasm and quite emphatically, Ken Blake,
MVP laid this on an unsuspecting readership ...

Your impression is wrong. You'll get conflicting points of
view here, but this is my advice: Leave the registry alone and
don't use a 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 the registry cleaner
erroneously removing an entry you need is far geater than any
potential benefit it may have.

You guys really have to stop reaching conclusions based on
unfounded assumptions and without knowing any of the facts,
except what you're taught by your Redmond buds. You are hardly in
a position to judge what is or is not going on with the tens of
thousands or millions of Windoze systems out there or what might
prompt a user to want utilities Bill the Gates is too damn dumb
to sell himself. In this case, the OP will likely hurt themselves
as they're going on hearsay that cleaning the Registry somehow
helps them, but in many years of solving various problems both
Windoze causes itself and misbehaving apps do to themselves,
there are indeed reasons to have a good cleaner as well as tools
to find entries by searching in a more sophisticated manner than
regedit.

I do the ROTFLMAO when I read many entries in the MS KB. It is
quite apparent that the wonks in Redmond regularly hose things
then have to put their tail between their legs and provide
sometimes very arcane Registry hacks for the inevitable tech
support calls.

So, rather than dismiss out-of-hand what you personally have no
direct experience with, why not increase your credibility and get
an OP to describe what they're trying to do and why before you
immediately reach the conclusion they are stupid.

 

[Guest]

Can anyone explain how a registry cleaner works? Is it magic?

 

[R. McCarty]

By resolving or validating items within the Registry. A common item
for cleaning might be a filename or pathname that does not exist. The
problem with cleaning is the "Associative" nature of keys/values. An
item may be linked or associated through other keys/values. Once
the association is broken, that function or reference may no longer be
valid. Registry Cleaning is akin to "Pealing-an-Onion" the more you
run a cleaner the deeper it drills into the Registry and the higher the
chance an association will become broken, breaking an application or
system operation.

It's not magic, but could be considered cryptic - like trying to decipher
Egyptian Hieroglyphics.

 

[Bruce Chambers]

I have never been one to clean the registry, nor do I know the benefits
of doing it,

None, that I'm aware of...

but I am under the impression that it could make my
computer run quicker and better.

Where'd that "impression" come from?

What specific problem are you experiencing that you *know* beyond
all reasonable doubt will be fixed by using a registry "cleaner?" If
you do have a problem that is rooted in the registry, it would be far
better to simply edit (after backing up, of course) only the specific
key(s) and/or value(s) that are causing the problem. Why use a shotgun
when a scalpel will do the job? Additionally, the manually changing of
one or two registry entries is far less likely to have the dire
consequences of allowing an automated product to make multiple changes
simultaneously.

The registry contains all of the operating system's "knowledge" of
the computer's hardware devices, installed software, the location of the
device drivers, and the computer's configuration. A misstep in the
registry can have severe consequences. One should not even turning
loose a poorly understood automated "cleaner," unless he is fully
confident that he knows *exactly* what is going to happen as a result of
each and every change. Having seen the results of inexperienced people
using automated registry "cleaners," I can only advise all but the most
experienced computer technicians (and/or hobbyists) to avoid them all.
Experience has shown me that such tools simply are not safe in the hands
of the inexperienced user.

The only thing needed to safely maintain your registry is knowledge
and Regedit.exe. If you lack the knowledge and experience to maintain
your registry by yourself, then you also lack the knowledge and
experience to safely configure and use any automated registry "cleaner,"
no matter how safe they claim to be.

To date, no one has ever demonstrated, to my satisfaction, that the
use of an automated registry "cleaner," particularly by an untrained,
inexperienced computer user, does any real good. There's certainly been
no empirical evidence offered to demonstrate that the use of such
products to "clean" WinXP's registry improves a computer's performance
or stability.



--

Bruce Chambers

Help us help you:



They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. -Benjamin Franklin

 

[Bruce Chambers]

yep, I can always count on an MVP to spout the company line here.

Sadly, however, that is *not* the company line. There is actually a
Microsoft web page recommending the cleaning of the registry. I'm not
going to do the general public the disservice of providing a link
however. If you want to damage your OS, find it for yourself.



--

Bruce Chambers

Help us help you:



They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. -Benjamin Franklin

 

[Bruce Chambers]

You need to re-read my post. I was talking about crap Windoze

You can't even spell the name of the operating system, but you feel
qualified to offer technical "insights?" Now, that's chutzpah!


--

Bruce Chambers

Help us help you:



They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. -Benjamin Franklin

 

[Bruce Chambers]

Very few MVPs will hear you, All. Whatever it is about that MVP
culture, whether it be ignorance or a condition of keeping the
"fancy" title of MVP, they are to this issue as closed minds are
to any issue. I've never fathomed why

It's mostly from many years of first-hand experience supporting
computers. We've simply learned better.



--

Bruce Chambers

Help us help you:



They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. -Benjamin Franklin

 

[Curt Christianson]

You may be thinking of "RegClean"(??). It caused more problems than it was
worth, and MS decided to quit offering the download. I'm not positive, but
I don't think MS even gave official support to it when it was available
(kind of like TweakUI).

--
Curt BD-MVBT

http://dundats.mvps.org/
http://dundats.proboards27.com/index.cgi
http://www.aumha.org/