LarCrow said:
I appriciate the responses but am surprised at the attitude taken about
registry cleaners. Now I'm just an old duffer who relies a quite a bit on
adice from the "experts". For several years I have subscribed to the
Langalist newsletter written by someone who seems to be pretty knowledgable
and who writes in a way that I can often understand.
Unfortunately, Mr. Langa is a journalist with *NO* technical experience
or training, according to his official bio. Some of his advice is has
been garnered from others, and is occasionally useful; unfortunately,
however, not everything he suggests is wise, some of it's just plain
dangerous.
His conistent advice
ofver the yeas has been to to use a registry cleaner and specifically one
called Easy Cleaner.
Which pretty much proves how little technical experience he has. His
sole criteria, according to his own articles, in judging the relative
"worth" of registry cleaners is how many times one must run the program
before it stops reporting errors: the fewer runs, the better. At no
time does he ever offer any evidence that the use of any of the reviewed
registry cleaners ever fixed actual problems or improved the computer's
performance. He treats these issues as "givens," when they're not. No
independent laboratory has ever confirmed the usefulness (other than to
separate the gullible from their money), safety, or efficacy of registry
"cleaners."
I have used it and probably have cleaned out 1000s of
lines of supposedly worthless entrie sin the register data that accumulated.
But this time was different, I was now using Vista and the quantitty is
huge. I guess I'm surprised that none of you think it's wise , or worthwhile
to keep the registry clean.
Having repeatedly 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. 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.
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. After
all, why use a chainsaw 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 only thing needed to safely clean
your registry is knowledge and Regedit.exe.
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.
More importantly, 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. Given the potential for harm, it's just not
worth the risk.
One of you ak what is it I want to do? I'd really want to delte all those
entries and move on, but I'm concerned that somewhere in this PCMove software
process that what might appear to be errouneous or illegal entries are in
fact good stuff. I n retrospect I should have made sure that Easy Cleaner
has been validated with Vista but I am currently trying to determine that. I
guess I was hoping that one of you might have had an experiene like it.
If you're not experiencing any detectable problems, leave the registry
alone. As one "old duffer" to another: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
--
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
Many people would rather die than think; in fact, most do. -Bertrand Russell
