Vista - Registry Cleaners: Boon or Boondoggle?

SOURCE: PC World - How to Clean Your Windows Registry and Speed Up Your PC



A cluttered Registry can slow Windows to a crawl, but cleaning it up effectively isn't easy. Steve Bass reviews some of the leading Registry cleaners, and offers tips to help you get your Registry down to size and improve your PC's performance.
Steve Bass, PC World


Let's start with a little quiz. I say "Big, bloated, and full of errors." What do you say? Right, "Windows Registry." One more: "Messing with it is risky." If you guessed the Registry again, you pass. While fooling around with your Windows Registry does involve some risk, cleaning it out can have an impact on your PC's overall performance.

The Windows Registry is an essential system file that houses a massive collection of details about your computer--where programs are stored, which helper programs (known as DLLs) are shared among your various applications, listings of all your Start-menu shortcuts, and pointers to the programs that fire up when you click on an icon. And that's just the beginning.

Practically everything you do in Windows is recorded somewhere in the Registry. For instance, the URL for this article probably has an entry now. The paths to the last dozen or so images or documents you opened are there, too, as are the details of the programs you most recently installed or uninstalled.

Here's the problem: If you pry open the Registry, you'll probably find it about as cluttered as a teenager's bedroom. That's because Windows doesn't efficiently clean up after itself as it goes about its daily business. It constantly creates new entries, but seldom--if ever--removes them after they're no longer needed.

Compounding that problem are applications that are too inept to uninstall all of the Registry entries they create; far too often, program upgrades and installers leave unneeded pointers in the Registry. So the Registry becomes bloated with unnecessary entries, slowing down your system.


Registry Cleaners: Boon or Boondoggle?

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Top Ten Registry Dos (and Don'ts)

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Registry Cleaners: How They Fared

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Hello Brink!

Thanks, this is very useful.









Later Ted

Registry cleaners are just potentially harmful snake oil IMHO

Yeah, I have really messed up a couple of installs 'experimenting' with them ...

Hehehe!










Later Ted

Strange. I have never had a registry cleaner mess up my system. Of course, I always go over the results before I let it delete them. I also let the program create a backup of the deleted registry entires to restore later if needed. I usually keep the backups for about a week to make sure there are not any ill effects from the results being deleted from the registry before deleting the backups.

Hello Shawn!

They always told me I was like a bull in a china shop, rushing in without looking.
But that's half the fun of 'experimenting'; to learn what NOT to do first.
Then learning what to do is the easy part ... hehehe!







Later Ted

In the XP days, they did wonders for performance. Although I do use Registry Clean Expert on Vista, I haven't noticed any noticable gain in performace or stability. Old habits die hard.

The registry cleaner in Fix It Utilities is good for deleting stuff it shouldn't and messing up one's system.

Registry cleaners are easy to install but a pain to uninstall. . . . . . . . . .

Hi Tanuj,

Strange, you usually should be able to uninstall them from Programs & Features without any problems. What program did you have trouble uninstalling?