windows algorithms prove
the effectiveness of these
programs.
however, i recommend
the one i have been using
for years:
http://www.amsn.ro/
btw: where did you
get your facts about registry
cleaners?
if you use windows, then
you should also follow
microsoft's guidelines:
http://onecare.live.com/site/en-US/article/registry_cleaner_why.htm
microsoft has the final
say in regards to it's o.s.
however, it's your final
say in regards to your p.c.
Wow, you really expect so much discussion regarding your posts that
you have to truncate them at just 30 chars per line to adjust for the
repeated indentation in each reply?
Remember that Microsoft bought GeCAD's RAV anti-virus program to
include in their OneCare bundle. They got a crappy AV program so they
could claim that they have some AV protection. Microsoft had to come
up with "something" to make good on their promise to increase
security. They also claimed they had a new OS in Vista which is
comprised primarily of different fluff in the GUI and a slew of other
fluffware.
Remember that the registry are files on your hard drive and that the
registry gets loaded into memory when Windows starts. Applications do
not access the registry from the files on the hard drive. They access
the registry from the memory copy. RAM is *random* access memory
which means it doesn't take any longer to access one byte than another
and skipping over unreferenced bytes consumes NO time when getting at
another byte in memory. The registry is a binary tree database so
searching through it is fast. Yes, there is some miniscule delay in
navigating through the branches if some are unreferenced or orphaned
(versus the eons in timescale that the computer waits for the user to
do anything for input via mouse or keyboard). Not until you have over
33MB in wasted space in the *disk* copy of the registry will you
achieve any "performance" increase of reducing the time to load the
registry by all of about a second or two. Most users cleaning up
their registry have vastly smaller sizes of unreferenced bytes in
their registry that they are cleaning out. They don't save any
measurable time to load the registry and once loaded in memory it
doesn't matter if you had 33MB of wasted space in the registry. It
does, however, affect how much memory you consume to load a copy of
the registry into memory. Considering how piggish anti-virus,
anti-spyware, firewall, and other security products have become, if
you can't afford the lost of 10KB to 33MB of wasted memory then you
really need to rethink what the hell you are loading on Windows
startup.
Registry cleanup utilities exist for one reason: users that feel they
need to occassionally vacuum up the lint. You could do the cleanup
yourself, and that's the type of user that should be using a registry
cleaner. When the utility presents you will a list of proposed
changes, YOU are the authority and claimed expertise that is making
the decision whether those changes are valid or not. I have registry
entries that are never valid under a normal load of Windows but only
when loaded under a particular diagnostics program, and every registry
cleaner will try to get rid of what it thinks are orphaned registry
entries when, in fact, they aren't orphaned under the *correct*
environment. But those using registry cleaners don't interrogate the
proposed changes. They don't understand the proposed changes. They
just say Yes and let the tool do its proposed changes, and the user
hopes that if there is problem that the backup the tool created can be
restored to get the registry back where it was (but going backwards
doesn't always get you back to where you started, especially if
changes have occurred since the backup was made).
A registry cleaner can shave off a few milliseconds to load the
registry into memory on Windows startup. It may produce a second or
two of saved time in the binary searches through the registry over the
course of a full day's use of the computer. The problem is with the
lack of expertise in the typical person that uses the registry
cleaner, along with the de facto scenario that the user doesn't
perform a backup that saves the current system state (including the
registry files) and hopes the backup of changes stored by the registry
cleaner might get them back where they started. These same users of
automatic cleanup tools after incurring resultant troubles will stare
at you like deer caught in headlights when you ask about their backups
(and if they include the system state or are partition/disk images).
The right tool in the wrong hands results in eventual disaster.
