kerneldebugger said:
I hope that you noticed that CCleaner offered you a chance to backup the
registry before you cleaned it. That's a nice feature, but I've never had
to use the backup and I've run CCleaner hundreds of times on quite a few
different computers. I've installed CCleaner on quite a few PCs where the
owners complained about the PC being slow, and it solved most of the
problems, except of course viruses.
The experts may be right, and they are much more knowledgeable than I...it
may not help, but it surely doesn't hurt and it's fun, if nothing else,
watching all the useless keys getting kicked out. CCleaner is also very
good for cleanng out temporary folders, history, et al, that never get
cleaned without a 3rd party program. XP Disk Cleanup doesn't get them
all; notice all the options in CCleaner. Any old version will work just
fine, I've been using CCleaner 229 since it came out with no problems.
I'll reply to you, but this example is really for all the posters who
think there can be no harm caused by CCleaner or other similar programs.
A few years ago, when I was the IT guy for a small company, I had 3
desktop PC's that were seriously slow. Took forever to open IE, any Office
program, any network resource. I went through almost every KB article
dealing with these problems, and frequented numerous web sites and news
groups. No joy.
Then one of the IT guys in Ohio recommended trying CCleaner (probably
v.1.xx; at that time, it was still called Crap Cleaner). I downloaded it,
installed it, and ran it on one PC as a test. Lo and behold, it worked!
Faster boot, faster IE access, faster Office. . .oh, wait, Office doesn't
work any more. Neither does our AS/400 business system. Bummer! Now I'm
worse off than I was. Ah, but wait, I backed up those keys before deleting
them. So I restored the deleted keys, and Office worked again, but still no
go on the AS/400. I had to reinstall it; not a big deal, but a wasted half
hour of time that I could have been using to do something else. Plus, all
the slowness was back again after restoring the deleted keys, and certain
aspects of some network resources didn't work right until the app was
reinstalled.
I've used it on my home PC (even some of the newer versions) and have had
no problems until the one time it wiped out part of the functionality of my
HP AIO printer. Going through the backup key by key, I found the ones that
should have been left alone and restored them. Still didn't work right. I
had to extract the files from the install .exe program and point to that to
make those functions work again. It was easier doing it that way than
uninstalling it, reinstalling the suite, and then reinstalling the updates
to it.
I know that as the end user, I should be looking at each and every one of
those keys before I let the program delete them, and for the most part, I
did. But on the rare occasion that I was lax (after all, there are usually
more than 120 entries that it wants to delete), I had a problem. Not every
time, but enough for me to not use the registry function of it. The rest of
it is great, and I continue to use it for cleanup and the Tools section.
With the amount of time and education that I've had with software, PC's,
file management, etc., I think I can say that I am probably a bit more
knowledgeable than the average PC user when it comes to what's necessary and
what's not, but all it takes is one slack moment to screw yourself.
BTW, the original problem with the slow PC's was caused by a combination
of an outdated AS/400 driver, network settings on the Ohio server, and a
couple of other small things I don't remember. Once we went to a newer
version of the IBM software and redid our server settings, all was well.
So, to sum it up, I say "Use at your own risk." If you aren't sure about
what to delete, don't. If you ignore that simple piece of advice, I hope you
have a viable backup and recovery plan in place, not just kerneldebugger,
but everyone who uses any kind of registry cleaner. I'm not saying there
will be a problem every time, but like others have posted, it's not a matter
of "if", but "when".