Free program to clean registry?

[mcv]

Hi,
Anyone know of a good free program to clean the regsitry on a win2k and an
xp pro systems?

Or should I just avoid this type of thing?

 

[Dan Seur]

The latter.

Hi,
Anyone know of a good free program to clean the regsitry on a win2k and an
xp pro systems?

Or should I just avoid this type of thing?





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[Dave Patrick]

Yep, ditto on the latter.

--

Regards,

Dave Patrick ....Please no email replies - reply in newsgroup.
Microsoft Certified Professional
Microsoft MVP [Windows]
http://www.microsoft.com/protect

:
| The latter.

 

[mcv]

Hi,
Thanks for reply.
So I should just leave the registry alone?

Just wondering google came up with a load of programs to buy that say
cleaning the registry improves the system.

 

[Dave Patrick]

Yes, unless you have some compelling reason to do so it's best to leave the
registry intact. If you do have an issue then deal with it specifically. Not
with some unknown shotgun effect.

--

Regards,

Dave Patrick ....Please no email replies - reply in newsgroup.
Microsoft Certified Professional
Microsoft MVP [Windows]
http://www.microsoft.com/protect

:
| Hi,
| Thanks for reply.
| So I should just leave the registry alone?
|
| Just wondering google came up with a load of programs to buy that say
| cleaning the registry improves the system.

 

[Jim Byrd]

Hi mcv - 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.martau.com/ or free direct dwnld here:
http://digilander.libero.it/molearchive3/tun235.zip or here:
http://freeware4u.com/modules/mydownloads/singlefile.php?lid=234, in the
first place.) (As an aside, there are, however, some third party Registry
Editors which can be of great help with both the incorrect uninstall and
with certain malware problems, especially some of theCoolWebSearch types
such as the AppInit_DLLs variant of the about:blank version of CWS, for
example. I can recommend Registrar Lite, here:
http://www.answersthatwork.com/Downright_pages/downrights_registry.htm This
is intentionally the older 2.0 version - to see their most current stuff,
take a look here: http://www.resplendence.com/registrar.)

There are a couple of specific bugs that can cause abnormal growth in either
the System or Software hives; however, they are rare, and unless these hives
in %SystemRoot%\System32\config are very, very large (in the hundreds of
megabytes), then I would council you to leave your Registry alone except for
the special circumstances I mentioned above.

I and most other MVP's that I know believe that Registry modifications of
any type are probably best done manually, very carefully, with a thorough
knowledge of what's installed on your machine, and what you're doing, and
then only when necessary. There's very little (if any!) noticeable benefit
in either space saving or speed achievable by cleaning out the Registry
except in those few cases where there's a specific problem the client is
experiencing (usually uninstall or malware related in my experience) that
needs to be fixed.

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://www.larshederer.homepage.t-online.de/erunt/ 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://www.larshederer.homepage.t-online.de/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.

FWIW, the second question I ask clients is whether they've recently used a
Reg Cleaner or tried to restore from one. (The first question I ask is
whether they've any non-commercial Norton/Symantec software installed.
)

--
Regards, Jim Byrd, MS-MVP/DTS/AH-VSOP
My Blog, Defending Your Machine, here:
http://DefendingYourMachine.blogspot.com/

Hi,
Thanks for reply.
So I should just leave the registry alone?

Just wondering google came up with a load of programs to buy that say
cleaning the registry improves the system.

Yep, ditto on the latter.

--

Regards,

Dave Patrick ....Please no email replies - reply in newsgroup.
Microsoft Certified Professional
Microsoft MVP [Windows]
http://www.microsoft.com/protect

The latter.

 

[Galen]

In Jim Byrd had this to say:

My reply is at the bottom of your sent message:

I and most other MVP's that I know believe that Registry
modifications of any type are probably best done manually, very
carefully, with a thorough knowledge of what's installed on your
machine, and what you're doing, and then only when necessary.
There's very little (if any!) noticeable benefit in either space
saving or speed achievable by cleaning out the Registry except in
those few cases where there's a specific problem the client is
experiencing (usually uninstall or malware related in my experience)
that needs to be fixed.

Heavily snipped as I intend to address this single portion of the message.

I am one of the MVPs who agree with this VERY strongly. I also suggest, very
strongly, that you make it a point to read any such cleaner carefully to
ensure that it makes a backup AND that you can access that backup -
preferably from outside of the OS if need be.

On the other hand, after many trials, I allow a single application to clean
my registry. It works well enough though it doesn't do anything, in my
opinion, to speed up the machine at all. I say it works very well, really,
but that's very specific. It works very well for me, with my install base,
with my applications, and with the way that I use it. I don't really run it
very often and only when the entire system is being cleaned and backups are
to be made. I don't use it to make my system faster - I use it to make the
sizes of the backups a few bytes smaller. I have never seen any system
improvement from cleaning or compacting the registry with ANY application on
ANY one of a number of systems.

When there's a problem with the registry I back it up and edit it by hand.
On some rare instances, very rare, I'll use something like ShellExView to
pull out context menu entries.

When I'm cleaning a client's system's malware infestation you can bet your
bottom dollar that I very SELDOM allow ANY application to touch the registry
and pull each and every single item out by hand. I use the application to
get a feel for things and to see the symptoms and then I do the removal in
safe mode manually.

Here's my standard bit:

Registry Editing Warning:
http://kgiii.info/windows/all/general/regedit_warn.html

Now, after reading that, do you want an automated tool that has, truthfully,
no idea what you have installed or how you use your system to have that much
control over your system?

It is unfortunate that plain text doesn't support bolding because if it did
I strongly suspect that Jim's post would have said something akin to:

"There's very little (IF ANY!) noticeable benefit..." <-- The IF ANY would
be in big bold flashing letters because even though I do clean my registry
when there's no need to it's not at all for the benefit of improvements to
the system but rather because the removal of the bytes is in my best
interests. If it was not for that then I'd have a hard time justifying
anything other than the very few instances which make editing the registry a
requirement. When tweaking (a bad idea in general) or when cleaning malware
(should not have happened in the first place but does) or when removing
context menu items (really follows under tweaking except when the items
force the explorer.exe process to crash) are the only instances that I can
think of that one might even run regedit at all.

This is in addition to the other bits of info that's been shared with you.

--
Galen - MS MVP - Windows (Shell/User & IE)
http://dts-l.org/
http://kgiii.info/

"We approached the case, you remember, with an absolutely blank mind,
which is always an advantage. We had formed no theories. We were simply
there to observe and to draw inferences from our observations." -
Sherlock Holmes