RegZooka

  • Thread starter Thread starter Jeff T
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Jeff T

My computer is slow and 6 years old, I've been thinking about trying
RegZooka. Is it worth the money?
I thought I'd ask before I jumped in and screwed something up.
Jeff
 
Jeff said:
My computer is slow and 6 years old, I've been thinking about trying
RegZooka. Is it worth the money?
I thought I'd ask before I jumped in and screwed something up.
Jeff
Click to expand...

There is one review here. Priceless :-)

http://download.cnet.com/RegZooka/9241-18512_4-11652913-1.html

"Crashed my computer twice. The software is buggy."
September 17, 2011 By thomas4471

*******

Let's try an experiment. I'll list the size of my registry
files. They've never been touched with a registry cleaner, ever.
How big are yours ?

Directory of C:\WINDOWS\system32\config

03/03/2012 286,720 DEFAULT
03/03/2012 24,576 SAM
03/03/2012 45,056 SECURITY
03/03/2012 19,398,656 SOFTWARE
03/03/2012 12,058,624 SYSTEM

HTH,
Paul
 
My computer is slow and 6 years old, I've been thinking about trying
RegZooka. Is it worth the money?
I thought I'd ask before I jumped in and screwed something up.
Click to expand...


It's not not worth the money, it would be worth some money to *not*
use it.

Registry cleaning programs are *all* snake oil. Cleaning of the
registry isn't needed and is dangerous. Leave the registry alone and
don't use any 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.

Read http://www.edbott.com/weblog/archives/000643.html

and http://aumha.net/viewtopic.php?t=28099

and also
http://blogs.technet.com/markrussin.../02/registry-junk-a-windows-fact-of-life.aspx

Let me point out that neither I nor anyone else who warns against the
use of registry cleaners has ever said that they always cause
problems. If they always caused problems, they would disappear from
the market almost immediately. Many people have used a registry
cleaner and never had a problem with it.

Rather, the problem with a registry cleaner is that it carries with it
the substantial *risk* of having a problem. And since there is no
benefit to using a registry cleaner, running that risk is a very bad
bargain.



Ken Blake, Microsoft MVP
 
Paul,
I'm sorry but I don't know where to find that info.
Maybe I shouldn't mess with something I don't know anything about.
Jeff
 
I'm sorry but I don't know where to find that info.
Maybe I shouldn't mess with something I don't know anything about.
Click to expand...

That's the best approach. Windows Registry is, in many ways, its brain.
I don't think you'd really want to perform brain surgery without
knowing anything about it, would you?

Besides, "Registry Cleaners" rarely if ever result in any performance
improvement. If your computer is slow, it's likely to be from other
causes, not that your registry needs "cleaning."
 
Nil said:
That's the best approach. Windows Registry is, in many ways, its brain.
I don't think you'd really want to perform brain surgery without
knowing anything about it, would you?

Besides, "Registry Cleaners" rarely if ever result in any performance
improvement. If your computer is slow, it's likely to be from other
causes, not that your registry needs "cleaning."
Click to expand...


I think I've got it figured out, it isn't my computer that's slow, it's the
website or my internet connection!
Jeff
 
Registry cleaning programs are *all* snake oil.
Click to expand...

You mean like 99.999% of the time right? As I have lots of computers
(more than I really need) and have tons of backups and all. And during
my free time I have a chance to test some of these things out.

And one time, a registry cleaner had a big payoff. There was an
application once that showed up in the context menu under Explorer if
you right clicked on a file. No problems until I uninstalled the program
and it left its entry in the context menu.

Without the application, the context menu had taken like 15 to 30
seconds to show up. That was very annoying. No error or anything, just a
huge delay. And that uninstalled program didn't even show up in the list
either. So I didn't even know why it was so slow.

A registry cleaned found it and removed it and the context menu popped
up instantly ever since. This is the only time I found a registry
cleaner ever had a big payoff.
Cleaning of the
registry isn't needed and is dangerous.
Click to expand...

Oh yes indeed. My experiments have shown that they can take a perfectly
working system and make it almost totally unusable.
 
Ken Blake said:
It's not not worth the money, it would be worth some money to *not*
use it.

Registry cleaning programs are *all* snake oil. Cleaning of the
registry isn't needed and is dangerous. Leave the registry alone and
don't use any 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.

Read http://www.edbott.com/weblog/archives/000643.html

and http://aumha.net/viewtopic.php?t=28099

and also
http://blogs.technet.com/markrussin.../02/registry-junk-a-windows-fact-of-life.aspx

Let me point out that neither I nor anyone else who warns against the
use of registry cleaners has ever said that they always cause
problems. If they always caused problems, they would disappear from
the market almost immediately. Many people have used a registry
cleaner and never had a problem with it.

Rather, the problem with a registry cleaner is that it carries with it
the substantial *risk* of having a problem. And since there is no
benefit to using a registry cleaner, running that risk is a very bad
bargain.



Ken Blake, Microsoft MVP
Click to expand...


Glad I asked!!

Jeff
 
Paul said:
Let's try an experiment. I'll list the size of my registry
files. They've never been touched with a registry cleaner, ever.
How big are yours ?

Directory of C:\WINDOWS\system32\config
Click to expand...

Is *that* where the registry is? Amazing - I didn't know (but I
haven't messed with it either). What is in ntuser.dat then? (I thought
it was there).

03/03/2012 286,720 DEFAULT
03/03/2012 24,576 SAM
03/03/2012 45,056 SECURITY
03/03/2012 19,398,656 SOFTWARE
03/03/2012 12,058,624 SYSTEM
Click to expand...

Just for the heck of it, I checked, and mine are quite bigger. On my
main working computer, software is 45 MB, and system - 14 MB. On
another computer that I use rarely, and that has only essential (for me)
software installed, software is 18 MB, and system is 5 MB. The rest are
bigger than yours, but that's because they're exact powers of 2. Default
is 512K, and the others - 256K each.
 
Patok said:
Is *that* where the registry is? Amazing - I didn't know (but I
haven't messed with it either). What is in ntuser.dat then? (I thought
it was there).



Just for the heck of it, I checked, and mine are quite bigger. On my
main working computer, software is 45 MB, and system - 14 MB. On
another computer that I use rarely, and that has only essential (for me)
software installed, software is 18 MB, and system is 5 MB. The rest are
bigger than yours, but that's because they're exact powers of 2. Default
is 512K, and the others - 256K each.
Click to expand...

I got a hint for where to look, from articles like this.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307545

I was just curious as to how much bigger Jeff's registry files would be.

What I know empirically about the registry:

1) OS and software, beat the hell out of it. It's accessed at a
relatively high frequency, and for no particularly good reason.
I can see the same registry setting being consulted, over and
over again, using Procmon.

2) If the computer has bad RAM, it's possible for the registry
files to get corrupted. Suggesting portions of the registry
might be living in RAM, and get flushed out again at some point.
It implies more than file system caching, because if content
is cached on reads, it's discarded at shutdown.

3) Searching the registry, is as slow as can be in regedit. Yet
I don't see any evidence that indexing into the registry is slow.
Which is probably why, if the registry gets a bit bigger, it's
not an issue. Maybe if the registry file became bigger than the
RAM in the machine, it would be an issue ? :-)

One problem is when a registry cleaner hits a malformed registry
entry, which wasn't hurting anything. And upon removal, it breaks
something else. In which case, at bare minimum, if you're going
to run a new tool like say a copy of "Registry Smasher" you got
off the Internet, you'd want to do a System Restore point first :-)
Because that backs up the registry for you, and prepares you for
KB307545 above.

Paul
 
Is *that* where the registry is? Amazing - I didn't know (but I
haven't messed with it either). What is in ntuser.dat then? (I thought
it was there).



Just for the heck of it, I checked, and mine are quite bigger. On my
main working computer, software is 45 MB, and system - 14 MB. On
another computer that I use rarely, and that has only essential (for me)
software installed, software is 18 MB, and system is 5 MB. The rest are
bigger than yours, but that's because they're exact powers of 2. Default
is 512K, and the others - 256K each.
Click to expand...



I just checked mine too. Mine are

DEFAULT 512KB
SAM 256KB
SECURITY 256KB
SOFTWARE 71MB
SYSTEM 14MB

So mine are all bigger than his, by 225KB, 232KB, 211KB, 51MB, and
2MB. That's a total of 86MB extra.

Two points:

1. The size of the registry is irrelevant with respect to performance,
since registry access is random, not sequential.

2. These days you can buy hard drives very inexpensively. A 500GB
drive (not particularly large) costs around $60 US. At that price,
86MB is less than one penny's worth.

So making the registry smaller is not a valid objective.

Ken Blake, Microsoft MVP
 
What I know empirically about the registry:

1) OS and software, beat the hell out of it. It's accessed at a
relatively high frequency, and for no particularly good reason.
I can see the same registry setting being consulted, over and
over again, using Procmon.
Click to expand...

First, second, and thirdly...

Paul! I have been meaning to say this for years and I never got around
to it. But I have been kicking myself all of this time and I must say it
now.

As I have worked with a lot of genius (meaning people far smarter than
I) over the past few decades. And you instantly impressed me from the
get go. As I know you have what it takes. Unfortunately few seems to
acknowledge this fact. And I am ashamed I never mentioned this earlier.
So zillions of kudos Paul, sorry that I am so late.

Secondly, I used some free program from Microsoft that I can't recall
the name of that monitors all disk writes. The normal stuff was no big
surprise, but the registry was being hit like 6 times a second at idle.
Just super amazing!

And thirdly, how did you indent your text under Thunderbird. Which this
Thunderbird in the quoting destroyed?
 
If your computer is six years old, I'd say there is a fair chance it
needs more memory. XP SP3 (and I think 2) really needs at least 768M
these days,
Click to expand...


I completely disagree. How much RAM you need for good performance is
*not* a one-size-fits-all situation. You get good performance if the
amount of RAM you have keeps you from using the page file
significantly, and that depends on what apps you run. Most people
running a typical range of business applications under XP find that
somewhere around 512MB works well, others need more. Almost anyone
will see poor performance with less than 256MB. Some people,
particularly those doing things like editing large photographic
images, can see a performance boost by adding even more than
512MB--sometimes much more.

My wife ran XP for several years (including under SP3) with 256MB,
doing almost nothing besides e-mail, solitaire, and an occasional web
search. Her 256MB was fine for her, and she several times rejected my
offer to add more memory.

Ken Blake, Microsoft MVP
 
In message <[email protected]>, "Ken Blake,


Except that the registry, as I understands it, spends most of its time
in RAM, being dumped to disc at I know not what intervals.
Click to expand...


It spends its time in memory, not in RAM (when I say memory, I'm
talking about what Microsoft calls Virtual memory--RAM plus the page
file). If it isn't being accessed, it will quickly be paged out by
applications that need the memory now. When paged out, its effect on
performance is nil.

(Though I don't think it being big makes a lot of difference to anything
- intellectually satisfying to prevent it, though.)
Click to expand...
Ken Blake, Microsoft MVP
 
BillW50 said:
First, second, and thirdly...

Paul! I have been meaning to say this for years and I never got around
to it. But I have been kicking myself all of this time and I must say it
now.

As I have worked with a lot of genius (meaning people far smarter than
I) over the past few decades. And you instantly impressed me from the
get go. As I know you have what it takes. Unfortunately few seems to
acknowledge this fact. And I am ashamed I never mentioned this earlier.
So zillions of kudos Paul, sorry that I am so late.

Secondly, I used some free program from Microsoft that I can't recall
the name of that monitors all disk writes. The normal stuff was no big
surprise, but the registry was being hit like 6 times a second at idle.
Just super amazing!

And thirdly, how did you indent your text under Thunderbird. Which this
Thunderbird in the quoting destroyed?
Click to expand...

I only recently heard, that my TB2 has been emitting this. format=flowed
is the default in TB2, and you have to use about:config (configuration
editor) to turn it off. (Tools : Options : Advanced : Config Editor)

"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed"

http://al.howardknight.net/msgid.cgi?STYPE=msgid&A=0&MSGI=<[email protected]>

Apparently, the intent is to cause other reading devices, to convert
things like the >> into colored bars, and also munge the appearance
of the text (automatically wrap lines for narrow reading devices).

http://seamonkey.ilias.ca/mailnewsfaq/FormatFlowed

Maybe I should turn it off ?

OK, as of this post, it's turned off.

I can see in the howardknight copy of my other posting, that indeed,
extra space characters are present, and somehow threw off the
indent by a character.

Paul
 
Oh, couldn't agree more: probably irritates you as much as the old
swap-file-proportional-to-your-RAM advice used to irritate me. (To me,
it always seemed that if you had more RAM, you needed _less_ swapfile.)
Click to expand...


I'm with you entirely. They *both* irritate me.

Indeed. I was rule of thumb ing.
Click to expand...


Understood, but I'm almost always against rules of thumb. They are
much too often wrong.

Was it actually slow (i. e. doing a lot of disc access) but she just
didn't mind, or ?
Click to expand...


It wasn't slow at all. Its performance was fine for the very light
things she did.

Ken Blake, Microsoft MVP
 
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