Bob said:
A lot registry cleaners make a lot of claims. I was wondering if any of you
guys could recommend the better of the crowd. Home computer, single user,
WinXP, Not looking for a free one, just a good one.
After uninstalling a program, *I* do the registry cleanup of any
remnants. I then use CCleaner to find any that I might've missed;
however, *I* review that list to determine which, if any, of its
proposed changes to perform. Although I have CCleaner save a backup of
the registry before making its changes, those backups are worthless if
the changes make my OS unusable. I also have a recovery strategy in
case the registry changes screw up the OS (I schedule full and
incremental image backups and also do a full image backup before
committing brain surgery on my OS).
* What is currently wrong or failing with the registry?
* What convinced you that the registry needs to be "cleaned" up?
* What constitutues the "cleaning" actions?
* What do you expect to gain from the cleanup?
* What are you going to do if the registry changes hose over your
computer or applications since a restore may not be possible?
* What is your recovery strategy from the registry changes?
_Why the uneducated should never use registry cleaners_
If YOU are not adept at *manually* editing the registry, don't use a
tool that you don't understand regarding its proposed changes.
Regardless of relinquishing the task to software, YOU are the final
authority in allowing it to make the changes. Any registry cleaner that
does not request for YOU to give permission to make its proposed changes
along with listing each proposed change should be discarded.
Do you have a backup & restore plan in place? When (and not if) the
registry cleaner corrupts your registry and when you can no longer boot
into Windows, just how are you going to restore that OS partition so it
is usable again? Even if you use a registry cleaner that provides for
backups of its changes so you can revert back to the prior state, how
are you going to perform that restore if you cannot boot the OS after
hosing over its registry? What about entries in the registry that look
to be orphaned under the current OS load instance but are used under a
different OS environment? You delete what looks orphaned only to find
out that they are required under a different environment.
Say there was an unusually high amount of orphaned entries in your
registry, like 4MB. By deleting the orphaned entries, you would speed
up how long it takes Windows to load the registry's files when it starts
up - by all of maybe 1 second. Oooh, aaah. All that risk of modifying
the registry to save maybe a second, or less, during the Windows
startup. Most folks that clean the registry end up deleting only 10KB,
or less. They are doing nothing to improve their Windows load time.
Since the registry is only read from the memory copy of it, and since
memory is random access, there is no difference to read one byte of the
registry (in memory) from the another byte in the registry (also in
memory). The extra data in memory for orphaned entries has no effect on
the time to retrieve items from the memory copy of the registry because
orphaned items are never retrieved (if they were then they aren't
orphaned).
Cleaning the registry will NOT improve performance in reading from the
memory copy of the registry. The reduced size of the registry's .dat
files might reduce the load time of Windows by all of a second and
probably much less. And you want to risk the stability of your OS for
inconsequential changes to its registry? The same boobs that get
suckered into these registry cleanup "tools" are the same ones that get
suckered into the memory defragment "tools".
A registry cleaner should only be used if you by yourself can correctly
cleanup the registry. The cleaner is just a tool to automate the same
process but you should know every change that it intends to make and
understand each of those changes. After all, and regardless of the
stagnant expertise that is hard coded into the utility, *YOU* are the
final authority in what registry changes are performed whether you do it
manually or with a utility. If YOU do not understand the proposed
change (which requires the product actually divulge the proposed change
before committing that change), how will you know whether or not to
allow that change?
