Do registry management programs work?

[gibberish]

I downloaded the trial version of two registry management programs and both
identified several "Registry Errors" but many were not the same. I cannot
"clean" the registry with these programs until I purchase the full version
but before I do that I would like to know if anyone has used Registry
Mechanic or RegiClean and if they do any good.

One program found 703 empty registry entries while the other didn't find
any.

 

[unclepeteDEL]

One program found 703 empty registry entries while the other didn't find
any.

I can tell you what I don't know. I found Registry Cleaner, a 6 mb proram
(XP Pro), that found over 450. It comes with the capability to run it
fully, free for 2 weeks. Being sort of halfway between a rock and a
reinstallation I told it to do it's thing. After cleaning up it went back
to the start page. Curious, I tried another run. And clean. All in all
it ran 4 rounds and did almost a thousand "repairs" before it listed zero
problems.

I haven't had any problems in operation yet. But, of course, there are
plenty who will say I'll be very sorry later. So far I've run registry
cleaners regulary for a number of years. In fact is was AFTER starting
after this and a couple other suggestions from "somebody" that all the
"several times a day" crash and reinstall of Win98 stopped. Again, plenty
of people will assure me that was a coincidence or the other measures or
that XP is not Win98. I cannot argue with that, altho some do (otherwise
who would write registry cleaner programs). I'm just telling what
happened and what didn't as of today.

JimL

 

[John John]

These things will do more harm than good. Get rid of them and save your
money! http://tinyurl.com/2njuoe

John

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

I downloaded the trial version of two registry management programs
and both identified several "Registry Errors" but many were not the
same. I cannot "clean" the registry with these programs until I
purchase the full version but before I do that I would like to know
if anyone has used Registry Mechanic or RegiClean and if they do any
good.
One program found 703 empty registry entries while the other didn't
find any.

I always recommend *against* the routine use of registry cleaners. Routine
cleaning of the registry isn't needed and is dangerous. 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 registry cleaner erroneously
removing an entry you need is far greater than any potential benefit it may
have.

--
Ken Blake - Microsoft MVP Windows: Shell/User
Please reply to the newsgroup



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[Ken Blake, MVP]

I can tell you what I don't know. I found Registry Cleaner, a 6 mb
proram (XP Pro), that found over 450. It comes with the capability
to run it fully, free for 2 weeks. Being sort of halfway between a
rock and a reinstallation I told it to do it's thing. After cleaning
up it went back to the start page. Curious, I tried another run.
And clean. All in all it ran 4 rounds and did almost a thousand
"repairs" before it listed zero problems.

I haven't had any problems in operation yet. But, of course, there
are plenty who will say I'll be very sorry later.

I'm one of those who regularly advises against using registry cleaners here.
But I'm not willing to say that you will "be very sorry later." You may or
may not be, and if you aren't already very sorry, you probably won't be. I
certainly don't think that every time someone runs a registry cleaner, he
trashes his computer.

However, every time you run a registry cleaner you run the *risk* that you
will damage something. If you run a registry cleaner, you may damage
nothing, you may do minor damage, or you may do major damage. Doing major
damage is a fairly rare occurence. My advice is not to use them because that
risk of major damage is always there, and because the promised benefits
don't exist. It's simply a bad tradeoff of value vs. risk.

 

[gibberish]

I downloaded the trial version of two registry management programs and both
identified several "Registry Errors" but many were not the same. I
cannot "clean" the registry with these programs until I purchase the full
version but before I do that I would like to know if anyone has used
Registry Mechanic or RegiClean and if they do any good.

One program found 703 empty registry entries while the other didn't find
any.

Thanks everyone. You have convinced me of what I probably knew all along.