ANY GOOD FREE REG CLEANERS FOR VISTA?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Martin ©¿©¬
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Are there any good free reg cleaners about?
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There are no good registry cleaners, free or otherwise.

I strongly suggest you avoid using any registry cleaning program.
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.
 
Yes there are!
It is called> Run>Regedit> And use YOUR keyboard yourself!
Make a backup 1st.
 
Are there any good free reg cleaners about?
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No. There are no good registry cleaners for Vista.

There are no good registry cleaners, for any version of Windows. Running any
of the popular registry cleaners is like washing your hair with petroleum:
sure it gets out the oil, but ...

The task is harder in Vista because of new aspects to the Vista registry,
like virtualisation (see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927387/en-us). A
registry cleaner would need to be specifically designed for Vista.

Even then, any registry cleaner is high risk, for little benefit. Don't
bother. As you can see, this opinion is shared by Malke, Ken Blake and Mick
Murphy (and many others too).

Don't be fooled by any anecdotal evidence ("I ran RegFoo and had no
problems; plus, my machine was 200% faster afterwards). Sure, you may be
able to run a reg cleaner once or twice and not have your machine explode in
your face. But it is a very high risk activity. And the "200%" would not be
borne out by any objective performance measurement, it's an optical
illusion.
 
Martin said:
Hi
Are there any good free reg cleaners about?
Click to expand...


There's no such thing as a "good" registry cleaner for any OS. About
the best that can be said for any of them is that they don't render the
computer unusable each time you use one.

Why do you think you'd ever need to clean your registry? What
specific *problems* are you actually experiencing (not some program's
bogus listing of imaginary problems) that you think can be fixed by
using a registry cleaner?

If you do have a problem that is rooted in the registry, it would
be far better to simply edit (after backing up, of course) only the
specific key(s) and/or value(s) that are causing the problem. After
all, why use a chainsaw when a scalpel will do the job? Additionally,
the manually changing of one or two registry entries is far less likely
to have the dire consequences of allowing an automated product to make
multiple changes simultaneously. The only thing needed to safely clean
your registry is knowledge and Regedit.exe.

The registry contains all of the operating system's "knowledge" of
the computer's hardware devices, installed software, the location of the
device drivers, and the computer's configuration. A misstep in the
registry can have severe consequences. One should not even turning
loose a poorly understood automated "cleaner," unless he is fully
confident that he knows *exactly* what is going to happen as a result of
each and every change.

Having repeatedly seen the results of inexperienced people using
automated registry "cleaners," I can only advise all but the most
experienced computer technicians (and/or hobbyists) to avoid them all.
Experience has shown me that such tools simply are not safe in the hands
of the inexperienced user. If you lack the knowledge and experience to
maintain your registry by yourself, then you also lack the knowledge and
experience to safely configure and use any automated registry cleaner,
no matter how safe they claim to be.

More importantly, no one has ever demonstrated that the use of an
automated registry cleaner, particularly by an untrained, inexperienced
computer user, does any real good, whatsoever. There's certainly been
no empirical evidence offered to demonstrate that the use of such
products to "clean" WinXP's registry improves a computer's performance
or stability. Given the potential for harm, it's just not worth the risk.

Granted, most registry "cleaners" won't cause problems each and
every time they're used, but the potential for harm is always there.
And, since no registry "cleaner" has ever been demonstrated to do any
good (think of them like treating the flu with chicken soup - there's no
real medicinal value, but it sometimes provides a warming placebo
effect), I always tell people that the risks far out-weigh the
non-existent benefits.

I will concede that a good registry *scanning* tool, in the hands
of an experienced and knowledgeable technician or hobbyist can be a
useful time-saving diagnostic tool, as long as it's not allowed to make
any changes automatically. But I really don't think that there are any
registry cleaners that are truly safe for the general public to use.
Experience has proven just the opposite: such tools simply are not safe
in the hands of the inexperienced user.


--

Bruce Chambers

Help us help you:



They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. ~Benjamin Franklin

Many people would rather die than think; in fact, most do. ~Bertrand Russell

The philosopher has never killed any priests, whereas the priest has
killed a great many philosophers.
~ Denis Diderot
 
Martin said:
Hi
Are there any good free reg cleaners about?
Click to expand...

To paraphrase the good Dr. Johnson:

"A registry cleaner is like a dog raised up on its hinder legs. It is not
surprising that it does it poorly; what is surprising is that it would want
to do it at all."
 
That's your opinion about if there good or not.

And yes there is a "Vista Reg cleaner" It's called desktop maestro.
Pctools.com

With any cleaner always do a backup 1st. This program will do that and there
is a restore for just in case.
 
Kevin Weaver said:
That's your opinion about if there good or not.
Click to expand...

Yes, that's my opinion :-)

As you can see, there are many other folks who think the same way.

Unfortunately, the Registry was never designed to easily garbage-collected.
That's a shame; but there you have it. Reliably "cleaning" the registry
requires an enormous amount of special-case knowledge about specific
products, undocumented links, etc. It is not computationally impossible (it
is not "NP-hard") but is a difficult task to get right. So of necessity, the
risk is high. Not every run of every registry cleaner will be irrevocably
fatal to the machine. It's like unsafe sex: not every casual encounter gives
you AIDS or gonorrhoea, but ...
 
Kevin said:
That's your opinion about if there good or not.

And yes there is a "Vista Reg cleaner" It's called desktop maestro.
Pctools.com
Click to expand...

Really? Please provide documented, independently verifiable scientific
evidence that using this product actually improves the stability and
performance of a computer. You'll be the first to ever do so.

With any cleaner always do a backup 1st. This program will do that and
there is a restore for just in case.
Click to expand...


And how does one access this "restore" function if, as is all too often
the case, the computer is rendered unbootable? Does "Desktop Maestro"
*require* the user to create a bootable recovery CD before proceeding?
If not, it's still not safe for the average person to use.



--

Bruce Chambers

Help us help you:



They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. ~Benjamin Franklin

Many people would rather die than think; in fact, most do. ~Bertrand Russell

The philosopher has never killed any priests, whereas the priest has
killed a great many philosophers.
~ Denis Diderot
 
Is there any software that you run have any documented, independently
verifiable scientific
evidence that using that product actually improves the stability and
performance of a computer ? No.

If your system should crash you do a restore then run that app and re-do the
changes it did.

That's why I said below. Do a *Backup first.

Oh, Vista is so great that one should not even need to run it right ?
Hell, they can't even fix a sleep problem. Which worked fine before RTM...
And almost a year later and still no fix. And the beta SP1 Still has not
addressed it. Yeah I know, It's still a beta.
 
Is there any software that you run have any documented, independently
verifiable scientific
evidence that using that product actually improves the stability and
performance of a computer ? No.
Click to expand...

Reg. cleaners really are just a feel-good gimmick...
like steam-cleaning car engines or periodically using
drain cleaner in your sink. Those things seem like good
planning if you don't understand how an engine or a
drain works, but they're really just a waste of money.

Most of the Reg. cleaners that I've seen only compare
installed software with the HKLM and HKCU Software subkeys.
They then remove entries for software that's been
uninstalled. But those entries are not doing any harm.
In some cases they may even be helpful: If you re-install
the software you'll sometimes get your preference settings
back without needing to re-select them.

You don't need any scientific testing to figure
out the issue one way or the other. And you don't have
to rely on anyone's opinion. Just think it through:
The Registry is a very big database. Invalid Software
subkeys are a tiny addition to the size of that database.
Since those keys are no longer used, they don't affect
anything else. So all they do is increase your database
size by a tiny fraction.

I think that some "cleaners", like Norton's WinDoctor,
do additional things like checking for invalid paths for
COM libraries in HKCR. That's potentially useful, but not
crucial. If you've accidentally deleted a necessary COM
DLL you'll find out soon enough without Norton needing
to tell you. And the fact that Norton has removed the key,
again, doesn't much matter one way or the other.

If you have a speed problem there are lots of places
to look without worrying about the Registry. For instance
you could disable System Restore and use disk image
backup instead. You can shut off some of the unnecessary
services. And most of all, you can turn off the useless
"skins" that provide the 3-D effects and painted windows
in XP and Vista. Those effects are actually bitmaps.
It's not hard to see how much CPU and RAM is needed
to keep track of repainting those bitmaps constantly
as you move things around on the Desktop.

Finally, if you want to get a sense of what kind of
speed differentials you're really talking about, download
Regmon, the program that shows Registry activity in
real time. I'm not certain that it's still available for Vista,
but it works on any other Windows version. If you
run Regmon and then open something like Internet Explorer
(or any other Microsoft software, especially) you'll be
stunned by the activity and the speed of the whole thing.
IE makes literally thousands of calls to the Registry in a
second or two, often making the same calls over and over
again. (Microsoft software in general seems to be very
wasteful that way. I have no idea why. You'll see the
same thing if you run Regmon while changing a setting in
Internet Options. IE doesn't just write the change to
the Registry. It waits until you close Internet Options
and then goes wild, re-writing all of the settings several
times over!)
 
Even if it is there, what harm does it do? It is never accessed and takes
up only a few kb of space? That may have been significant when drives were
10mb, but means nothing now.
 
CCleaner works fine, as does Registry Mechanic. I've used both with no
problems at all.
 
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