Live registry cleaner

[Guest]

I've read many many many posts on registry cleaners, and by in large have
concluded they are not normally needed. However, that being said, why has
Microsoft come out with one on their safety live clean up site?

I will say for the record that I've used registry healer on my business
computer after 2 years of hard use. Hard use here being defined as update
pushes from the IT group who likes to "secure and customize" Window patches.
Yea, scares me too. I noticed an improvement when I booted. No, I didn't
use a stop watch, too much like work. I can say before the cleanup it was
taking around 2 minutes, and now it boots in under a minute.

That being said, that was after two years of hard use. So I've always
thought that my home computer probably did not have those issues. Still, I'm
surprised to see Microsoft with their own registry cleaner. So is it a good
idea afterall to run these things?

Gary

 

[Rich Barry]

Microsoft has had one since Win95 days. If I remember correctly it's
called RegClean. It is one of their unsupported tools.
Most here are concerned about the indiscriminate use of registry
cleaners since the potential damage could be severe.
Since you have had good experience with Reg Healer I would see no
problem in continuing it's use. Personally I use
a variety of reg cleaners and have had no problems. Though I remember
that when WinXP first came out I was using
System Mechanic and at that time I had a few major problems but that was
five years ago. Today, System Mechanic is
one of my favorites.

 

[Alec S.]

I've read many many many posts on registry cleaners, and by in large have
concluded they are not normally needed. However, that being said, why has
Microsoft come out with one on their safety live clean up site?

Running even their own cleaner on a brand-spanking-new and fresh install of Windows will find a lot of "problems". Generally
speaking, you should avoid them since they are not nearly intelligent enough to find actual problems, but flag whatever looks
suspicious which includes all manner of things that are not of actual concern.

Invalid file references are rarely a problem (under certain circumstances, they can cause problems or delays, but for all intents
and purposes they don't.) Other than that, these programs don't do much else; they are almost exclusively limited to just finding
missing files links so there's very little reason to actually run them.

They usually just cause more problems than they solve. That said, an advanced user can reap SOME benefit. For example, I recently
tested one and found that there was a reference to a file that did not exist. I fixed it so now it's working correctly and I have
not noticed any difference whatsoever.