Kayman knows far more about this than I do, and I'd follow his advice.
Thanks Bill but hold your horses...it would certainly be remiss if I did
not give credit where credit was due; I am only a 'messenger'
What I know is merely based on experience (got bitten pretty badly using
registry cleaners and 3rd party PFW), reading pertinent articles by
accomplished experts, visiting good blogs and follow their advice; Though
you've got to pick the 'experts'
Unfortunately these educational
articles are not widely enough distributed as they are perceived for not
having any commercial value; oh well.
Judging on the widely (mis)use of registry cleaners and 3rd party PFW's it
is evident that marketing *is* working. I therefore find it appropriate to
post "other" educational articles/information to users who rely too heavily
on advertisement hype which after analyzing hopefully should give them a
different perspective and considering their options more intelligently.
The reason I was able to reverse what the "safety.live.com" registry cleaner
had done was that it saves its changes as a .REG file, so you can simply
apply that file to the registry and reverse what it has done. However, this
fact is not included in any of the help for the product, as I recall, so you
need to have been told by Microsoft where to find the critter.....
I've worked for a multinational company all my working life. It is not
unusual that the department heads of these large organizations have
different goals (not to mention politics). A good example is of course
Microsoft offering to their average home user a 'safe' registry cleaner; I
don't think they (marketing department) consulted with Dr. Mark Russinovich
I've consistently challenged users who tell me that a registry cleaner makes
a noticeable performance difference on their system, and I've only had one
response where I think that the user might be right: This was a developer
who regularly debugs installation packages for his code. In his case, he is
constantly creating and removing registry entries for his test packages, and
it seems possible to me that he might see a performance change--probably
specifically in that work--after cleaning the registry.
For somebody (program engineer) who knows the innards of an operating
system a good-quality registry cleaner is probably a useful tool.
I'll do it occasionally, but I've never found any measurable benefit, and
sometimes seen issues--as I posted. Even CCleaner, which is well maintained
and responsive, needs care in using, as Kayman's post notes.
Yes, this caution applies to virtually all 3rd party software which are not
an integral part of the original operating system; Some of these software
are badly coded which can play havoc with your pc.
