Vista - Registry Cleaners

Hey everyone,

I've just re-imaged my hp lappy because of the problems outlined in this post. I'm hoping that the problems were software rather than hardware related, and if that's the case, it might be malware related.

However, it occurred to me that there might be another way that I could have messed up my system. I use Ccleaner pretty regularly to clean up the registry, mostly a habit I developed on XP machines, and I've never had a problem. But I was listening to Leo LaPorte the other day and he said he doesn't touch his registry with cleaners because of the problems it causes.

What do you think? Is cleaning your registry a good thing or trouble in Vista?

Speaking of Leo LaPorte I miss the old ScreenSavers show. Does he have a web radio show or something?

As to your question using CCleaner to clean out temp files, cookies and mru lists is fine. I would say the safest way to do registry cleaning is right after a system snapshot taken when your system is working well as far as you can tell.

It's one of those things were most of the time it shouldn't cause a problem but it can be pretty nebulous how to get things back to where they were. Restore point should save the registry too but if you have say an XP multiboot setup, a lot of times if the Vista system partition is visible to XP, then XP will erase your restore points. Many times when I boot back into Vista the first thing I do is check if there are any restore points. There seems to be no way to predict when XP will erase the Vista restore points.

A system snapshot is your best protection. I use Paragon Drive Backup Personal 9.0
but there are other good ones < $50 also.

You could try software such as the Auslogics Registry Defrag: Defragment and Compact the Registry to Speed Up Your Computer

I would advise against running any reg cleaners, they tend to cause more problems than what they solve, what performance is gained from these is barely noticable.

Other opinions on reg cleaners: miekiemoes has a writeup here and another article by Bill Castner is located here Worth a reading too

The only tool I recommend registry wise is erunt for backing up purposes

Yes! I've been a long-time fan of most of the stuff he does, which includes podcasting, a radio show, and live streaming video. You can catch him at The TWiT Netcast Network with Leo Laporte and TWiT Live - Live Netcasts from TWiT with Leo Laporte and Friends. Patrick Norton is still kicking on Tekzilla from Revision 3.

I have an HP MediaSmart home server that backs up my system every day, so that is covered. The problem is that I didn't recognize that my system was messed up until it was way too late to figure out when it had occurred so I could go back to fix it. It was very subtle...at first.

@Magdelaine thanks for the info. Yeah, it's tough esp. with Windows half the time it could be just explorer acting up.

I guess with snapshot backups about all you can do is try to pick a backup you have from when stuff was working well afaycr and lay it on. Run it for awhile and see if anything goes weird. PITA though to be sure. I do believe the main thing with Registry is not "performance" so much as eliminating dead references. It's tough to know safe ways to do it though. On my Vista I had the problem where running a program asked me if I wanted to install it. So I ran the MS installer cleanup tool and that got rid of that strange behavior. OTOH when I run wmi scripts to do stuff like create a restore point, that seem to work for everyone else, I get nadda. So who knows what got hosed? It's just a mess.

Cleaning the registry for performance issues is a huge myth...i'd say if you are using one stick to CCleaner and ignore the rest.
Some have been known to do more harm than good.

I'd have to say that cleaning the sytem registry is generally a good thing. I clean mine on a semi regular basis, esp. after install and uninstalling software that I've wanted to test.

Then there are times when you absolutely must clean the registry. I work with an enterprise sized scanning and imaging solution. Un-installing really requires a system reg clean when I need to reinstall it. To the point were it doesn't install at all. In fact the producer even provides a tool to clean the system registry and various componets prior to re-installing.

And sometimes, it's better to go in and clean the registry manually. Before you do, simply export the registry. If you need to, you can re-import it.

In MY experiences, running a system registry cleaner has generally been very good. I've had few, if any problems. I also use CCLeaner and Auslogics Registry Cleaner (both free), and have used others in the past. And yes, there are cleaners out there that are nothing more than scams, wanting you to pay for them before they clean anything.

did you not mean Auslogics Registry Defrag.... im looking for a slightly better cleaner my self other than cleaner as i know its missing a lot of stuff and i just searched Auslogics Registry Cleaner but can not find it... if you are correct that it is Auslogics Registry Cleaner could you be so kind as to post a downloadable link to it

your reason to use a registry cleaner, should only be for; error message, system instability, not for performance.

personally i use "Eusing free registry cleaner"is the safest i have used, it first scans your system and labels which entry is safe to delete, but remember to always make a back up of your registry just in case