Cleaning the Registry (WIN2K)

[Jay Somerset]

Which is the best utility to clean the registry?
- Regseeker
- Regclean 4.1a
- RegScrub

Are there any others that are good?

 

[George Hester]

None. There is really no reason to do this. Is there anything wrong that influences you to want to do this?

 

[Jay Somerset]

None. There is really no reason to do this. Is there anything wrong that influences you to want to do this?

Bloat; removing enties from software that has been tested, and then
uninstalled. Most uninstallers do a lousy cleanup job, as you know.

 

[Alias]

"Jay Somerset" wrote

that influences you to want to do this?

Bloat; removing enties from software that has been tested, and then
uninstalled. Most uninstallers do a lousy cleanup job, as you know.

Check out SystemSuite by V-Com www.v-com.com

Alias

 

[George Hester]

I agreee bloat. But actually that is not a good reason to do that. One reason is that although what may look like bloat may in fact be necessary. Microsoft's tool regclean had just this problem it could not reliably differentiate bloat from necessary. And I really know of no application which CAN do it reliably. So in my expereience bloat although looks bad really has no beneficial result and the risks are not worth the attempt. But you decide it's your system. Just my 2 cents here.

 

[Jim Byrd]

I heartily agree, George. FWIW, my 2 cents:

In my experience all of these Reg cleaners, even the best, are fraught with
danger. I advise against using them except in one specific instance, that
is when you have one that is capable of doing specific Reg searches, and
you NEED (not just WANT) to remove the remaining traces of something that
didn't get uninstalled correctly. (and you didn't have foresight enough to
install it using Total Uninstall,
http://www.geocities.com/ggmartau/projects/projects.html, in the first
place.)

Lastly, if you must screw around with your Registry, then at least get
Erunt/Erdnt, and run it before you do the Reg clean. You'll then have a
true restore available to you. Read below to see why you might not just
using the Reg cleaner's restore:

Get Erunt here for all NT-based computers including XP:
http://home.t-online.de/home/lars.hederer/erunt/index.htm I've set it up to
take a scheduled backup each night at 12:01AM on a weekly round-robin basis,
and a Monthly on the 1st of each month. See here for how to set that up:
http://home.t-online.de/home/lars.hederer/erunt/erunt.txt, and for some
useful information about this subject.

This program is one of the best things around - saved my butt on many
occasions, and will also run very nicely from a DOS prompt (in case you've
done something that won't let you boot any more and need to revert to a
previous Registry) IF you're FAT32 OR have a DOS startup disk with NTFS
write drivers in an NTFS system. (There is also a way using the Recovery
Console to get back to being "bootable" even without separate DOS write NTFS
drivers, after which you can do a "normal" Erdnt restore.) (BTW, it also
includes a Registry defragger program). Free, and very, very highly
recommended.

FYI, quoting from the above document:

Note: The "Export registry" function in Regedit is USELESS (!) to make a
complete backup of the registry. Neither does it export the whole registry
(for example, no information from the "SECURITY" hive is saved), nor can the
exported file be used later to replace the current registry with the old
one. Instead, if you re-import the file, it is
merged with the current registry, leaving you with an absolute mess of old
and new registry keys.


--
Please respond in the same thread.
Regards, Jim Byrd, MS-MVP



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