Registry "Cleaner"

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Anonymous

I am looking for a reliable program that deletes unwanted/unnecessary entries from the registry.


Biteman
 
Anonymous said:
I am looking for a reliable program that deletes unwanted/unnecessary entries from the registry.


Biteman

I have been using RegSeeker for some time with good results.
 
I have been using RegSeeker for some time with good results.

Plenty to choose from:

Reg Cleaner
Crap Cleaner
JV Powertools
Easy Cleaner
Reg Seeker

--
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
El Gee

Did you hear the one about the dyslexic, agnostic, insomniac?
He would stay up late every night and wonder if there was a dog.


Remove yourhat to reply ... but it may take a while.
Best to go to www.mistergeek.com and reply from there.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 
Anonymous posting canine. This place is going to the "dogs".

Who GAF about anonymous posting as long as it is OT? Some of us use it as an expansion of our
anti-spam practices. Most people who post to newsgroups try to fake their addresses anyway, and
those that don't get hammered by spam once their post hits the group. All I care about is
whether the subject is on-topic or not.
 
Who GAF about anonymous posting as long as it is OT? Some of us use it as an expansion of our
anti-spam practices. Most people who post to newsgroups try to fake their addresses anyway, and
those that don't get hammered by spam once their post hits the group. All I care about is
whether the subject is on-topic or not.

It was a joke like "what is A Melon doing on Usenet"? Talking fruit, I
don't need.

Btw, are you a water, honeydew or musk?
 
El Gee said:
Plenty to choose from:

Reg Cleaner
jv16 predecessor, but is it better? if so, i may try in future.
Crap Cleaner
for myself, i need to research this one.
JV Powertools
Easy Cleaner
posts scared me off this one.
Reg Seeker

only yesterday I tried a few. based on acf posts, the PL vote threads, ,,, i tried in this order: RegSeeker. JV16 Powertools.
RegAlyzer


--------
RegSeeker (http://www.hoverdesk.net/freeware.htm) search allows checkbox choice of 'hives' (HKEY level) and
activeX OCX choice. search found stuff. It has "Jump To" which works well. and I then poke around the region of registry to
see what I'm messing with. I judge this effective. i used almost all of the features in Regseeker, because they seem to be
obvoius in the UI. RegSeeker' s a keeper for me.

my future use: ? I'd still like to figure out how to pursue the many OCX and clsid "bad" entries RegSeeker found.

----------
JV16 Powertools, PL's 'last freeware' ver. JV16 seems to have more tools (I haven't investigated). I used only the reg tools.
JV16 reg search results includes some basic recommendations in a comment column. there *seems* to be no 'jump to reg
location' command. the column widths jump around when I try to adjust widths (however I think there is a persistent tooltip to
show those long keys). can't copy AFAIK (tried mouse context menu and menu bar menus). Many aspects of the UI make me a
bit uneasy about clicking the wrong thing. there seem to be at least minimal UI customizatoins available.

my future use: none, probably
--------
RegAlyzer 1.0f (spyware-info project that seems to have gone dormant in 2003) Since I still didn't find my "planted"
search term[1], I also tried Regalyzer.

Spybot pre=ver1.2 included a semi-useful reg entries check function. Regalyze resembles that check function, but can also do
searches.

IIRC, search allows checkbox choice of 'hives' (HKEY level). the search works well. it found my "planted" search term that
RegSeeker, jv16, and MS regedit didn't find (I wonder why?). but Regalyzer doesn't "jump to" reg location. however, the search
window is completely independent of the reg tree view (nicer if windows had a slightly different taskbar icons, quiblle quibble),
so the user can browse to locations found by search window. also a keeper IMO.

my future use: http://www.safer-networking.org/en/regalyzer/index.html
list implies there *is* some "jump to" avavilble.

[1] btw, the "planted" search phrase was a folder I deliberately renamed. name was about 9 letters, contained only alpha char,
and included a lot of u's: "uuuuu" to be unique.

all these experiences refer to a few hours of use on WinME. hope my info helps someone, and thx to other persons who post.
 
It was a joke like "what is A Melon doing on Usenet"?

yes, but wasn't super obvious, whihc is why people should just relax about usenet :-)

Talking fruit, I
don't need.

how about charitalbe Mellons? ('charities' might be dubious, i suppose)

is typing fruit ok? how about a nut screaming into a megaphone at your county fair? is that better? :)
Btw, are you a water, honeydew or musk?

Santa Claus, crenshaw, casaba, Citron, Pepino, Galia, Seedless
 
yes, but wasn't super obvious, whihc is why people should just relax about usenet :-)

Talking fruit, I

how about charitalbe Mellons? ('charities' might be dubious, i suppose)

is typing fruit ok? how about a nut screaming into a megaphone at your
county fair? is that better? :)
Santa Claus, crenshaw, casaba, Citron, Pepino, Galia, Seedless

Irrelevant. Could you post your EULA for us to look over? And do you
come with any registry entries?
 
Hi Biteman - Well, one dissenting voice for you -

In my experience all of these Reg cleaners, even the best, are fraught with
danger. I advise against using them except in one specific instance, that
is when you have one that is capable of doing specific Reg searches, and you
NEED (not just WANT) to remove the remaining traces of something that didn't
get uninstalled correctly. (and you didn't have foresight enough to install
it using Total Uninstall, http://www.geocities.com/ggmartau/tu.html or
direct dwnld here: http://files.webattack.com/localdl834/tun234.zip, in the
first place.)

Lastly, if you must screw around with your Registry, then at least get
Erunt/Erdnt, and run it before you do the Reg clean. You'll then have a
true restore available to you. Read below to see why you might not just
using the Reg cleaner's restore:

Get Erunt here for all NT-based computers including XP:
http://home.t-online.de/home/lars.hederer/erunt/index.htm I've set it up to
take a scheduled backup each night at 12:01AM on a weekly round-robin basis,
and a Monthly on the 1st of each month. See here for how to set that up:
http://home.t-online.de/home/lars.hederer/erunt/erunt.txt, and for some
useful information about this subject.

This program is one of the best things around - saved my butt on many
occasions, and will also run very nicely from a DOS prompt (in case you've
done something that won't let you boot any more and need to revert to a
previous Registry) IF you're FAT32 OR have a DOS startup disk with NTFS
write drivers in an NTFS system. (There is also a way using the Recovery
Console to get back to being "bootable" even without separate DOS write NTFS
drivers, after which you can do a "normal" Erdnt restore.) (BTW, it also
includes a Registry defragger program). Free, and very, very highly
recommended.

FYI, quoting from the above document:

"Note: The "Export registry" function in Regedit is USELESS (!) to make a
complete backup of the registry. Neither does it export the whole registry
(for example, no information from the "SECURITY" hive is saved), nor can the
exported file be used later to replace the current registry with the old
one. Instead, if you re-import the file, it is merged with the current
registry, leaving you with an absolute mess of old and new registry keys.

--
Please respond in the same thread.
Regards, Jim Byrd, MS-MVP



In
 
Jim Byrd said:
In my experience all of these Reg cleaners, even the best, are fraught with
danger.

I have used RegSeeker for over 1 1/2 years with '98, '2K and 'XP
systems and *never* experienced problems. So where's the danger?

Querulantus
 
Hi Querulantus - Apparently for you, there's been none. Well Done! I hope
you continue to be as fortunate.

FWIW, one of the first few questions I ask a client (as, BTW, do many others
in this business - we've discussed this particular issue in one of our
private groups) is whether s/he's used a registry cleaner recently, if so,
when, and whether s/he's done any installation(s) since, because they are so
often a cause of problems by making erroneous deletes which aren't then
correctly recoverable in many cases even when a backup has been made.

After reading your post, I installed RegSeeker just to see how good it might
be and did a scan with it. It found 817 items - both red and green - on my
fairly large Win2kProSP4/IE6SP1 fully updated test system. After finding
five erroneous deletes in just the first 15 or so *greens* that I looked at,
I quit bothering.

I and most other MVP's that I know believe that Registry modifications of
any type are probably best done manually, very carefully, with a thorough
knowledge of what's installed on your machine, and what you're doing, and
then only when necessary. There's very little (if any!) noticeable benefit
in either space saving or speed achievable by cleaning out the Registry
except in those few cases where there's a specific problem the client is
experiencing (usually uninstall or malware related in my experience) that
needs to be fixed. (As an aside, there are, however, some third party
Registry Editors which can be of great help with both the incorrect
uninstall and with certain malware problems, especially some of the
CoolWebSearch types such as the AppInit_DLLs variant of the about:blank
version of CWS, for example. I can recommend Registrar Lite, here:
http://www.resplendence.com/reglite .)

Good luck to you, though!

--
Please respond in the same thread.
Regards, Jim Byrd, MS-MVP



In
 
After reading your post, I installed RegSeeker just to see how good it might
be and did a scan with it. It found 817 items - both red and green - on my
fairly large Win2kProSP4/IE6SP1 fully updated test system. After finding
five erroneous deletes in just the first 15 or so *greens* that I looked at,
I quit bothering.

I've found RegCleaner (By TweakNow) to be annoyingly conservative. Maybe it
would be more to your liking to recommend to novices and the timid. It's
safe, yet much faster than searching out erroneous keys and values by hand.

A very good compromise is to use a reg cleaner (example RegSeeker) to FIND
the bad keys, and use the program (example RegSeeker) to open RegEdit for
manual editing.

Another good technique is to use Regseeker to delete bunches of entries,
but let it save the keys and values it deletes, so they can be restored. The
REG files are easily edited before restoring, so that's a big time saver.

I have used many registry editors, and deleted hundreds of "yellow" or "red"
entries at once with no harm. Either the keys were restored on the next use
of the software, on the next re-boot, or in the case of hardware, it was
re-detected.

I wouldn't really call any registry entry "dangerous", because they will not
harm your hardware or data. Worst case scenario is having to sit through a
30 minute Windows re-install, which is *very annoying, but not dangerous. :)

Back in the old days, I would manually delete the entire HKLM *ENUM section
and let Windows re-detect hardware on re-boot. It was faster than manually
finding nasty redundant drivers. :)

-- Bob
 
På Fri, 10 Dec 2004 12:03:14 +0100 (CET), skrev Anonymous
I am looking for a reliable program that deletes unwanted/unnecessary
entries from the registry.


Biteman
I've used several, but with caution.
The only one that has never exposed me to disaster, is Easy Cleaner.
It's probably not the most effective, but it's the one I feel I can trust
the most.
Used it with W95, 98, 98SE and 2000.
 
Just an example of a small danger... I found in XP that F1 wouldn't start
the Help function. After searching the web I found a registry patch that
restored it. Apparently the problem is caused by the unintentional removal
of registry entries.
 
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