Registry cleaners! need advice

Hello guys, since it's my first post, I think I should introduce myself. My name is Michael and I'm from Belfast. I enjoy working with computers and have recently installed windows vista ultimate x64 on my new Q6600 machine.

I've read many articles about registry cleaners, some praise them, some advice not to use them. My question is, what is the best way to keep the registry in vista in its best condition? Are there any reliable programs which won't **** the registry after doing a cleanup? I've installed two programs just to check how many errors they'll detect. There were over 10000 errors! I decided not to remove them because I was a bit afraid of not being able to start windows the next day...

I've only installed the Windows couple of days ago, it's absolutely brilliant, fast, stable and great looking

This is a tricky one since there are so many registry cleaners/optimizers on the market now that trying to find the one that really does what it says it can do is a headache I think the best way is trial and error but from my past experiences the smaller the app the better!! I use CCleaner alot which is a free download and have used Vista Optimizer which seems to do the job! sorry i cant be more specific but like i said trial and a lot of errors!! lol. Hope this helps??

My advice to you is DON'T USE THEM for the following reason:

Since you only installed Vista a couple of days ago it is extremely unlikely that you will have a dozen or so errors in the registry, let alone the 10,000+ that were being claimed. Any superfluous entries in the registry are simply ignored.
Dwarf

I agree with Dwarf, having only just done a fresh install its very unlikley that your registry would have such a high number of errors as that?? but going back to registry cleaners, there are a lot of bad apps out there on the market but IMO CCleaner has never let me down before, and ive used it on both vista and XP! + for a free app that cant be bad but i wouldnt use anymore than that! I usually do most regediting myself!!

Thank you for your suggestions

Another thing, I heard that vista, unlike xp gets faster when you use it for longer. Is that true?

I use ccleaner also, awesome liitle app and Tune Up Utilities "one button clean up" aswell as all its other many functions. I have used Tune Up Utilities for the last 2 year and its really good.

I used to use tuneup utilities but i found that i could do most of the things that it could do was built into vista anyways, apart from the reg defrag! so i stopped using it but im not saying its a bad app in anyway, TBH i try and limit the amount of optimizers i install on my system now because like i said vista can do it all for you.!

That seems to be what I am experiencing. But only slightly faster.

Back to Reg Cleaners. There are good ones out there. Make sure if you do decide to buy one that it has a restore feature....and a feature where you click on an item in the to "clean" that it can give you an explaination how that file may have got there.

used CCleaner on XP box and run it on vista, just checked the vista reg bit and have some games which did not work, unused file extensions like .XviD-NEPTUNE and similair things, piles of .php and .rar extensions from ripping websites


it backs up registry in any case

CCleaner and Auslogic's Registry Defrag every once and a while.