V
victoratsympatico.ca
I am thinking of buying a registry cleaner. Any recommendations of
which one may be best. Thanks.
Vic
which one may be best. Thanks.
Vic
You are using an out of date browser. It may not display this or other websites correctly.
You should upgrade or use an alternative browser.
You should upgrade or use an alternative browser.
M
Malke
victoratsympatico.ca said:I am thinking of buying a registry cleaner. Any recommendations of
which one may be best. Thanks.
None. Never ever ever. See this thread for why:
http://aumha.net/viewtopic.php?t=28099
Malke
D
dairyman
victoratsympatico.ca said:I am thinking of buying a registry cleaner. Any recommendations of
which one may be best. Thanks.
Vic
CCleaner is a safe registry and HDD cleaner. I've being using it for a long time and never
had any problems.
A
Alan Edwards
I would recommend you don't get one at all.
Read a few threads on the subject in Google, like:
http://groups.google.com.au/groups/search?ie=UTF-8&q=registry+cleaner+snake+oil&qt_s=Search
....Alan
Read a few threads on the subject in Google, like:
http://groups.google.com.au/groups/search?ie=UTF-8&q=registry+cleaner+snake+oil&qt_s=Search
....Alan
B
Bruce Chambers
victoratsympatico.ca said:I am thinking of buying a registry cleaner. Any recommendations of
which one may be best. Thanks.
Vic
Why do you even 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
wide-spread 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:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/555375
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
B
Bruce Chambers
dairyman said:CCleaner is a safe registry and HDD cleaner. I've being using it for a
long time and never had any problems.
CCleaner's registry scanner seems relatively benign, as long as you
step through each detected "issue" one at a time, to determine if it
really is an "issue" or not, and then decide whether or not to let the
application "fix" it. In my testing, though, most of the reported
"issues" won't be issues, at all. I tried the latest version on a
brand-new OS installation with no additional applications installed, and
certainly none installed and then uninstalled, and CCleaner still
managed to "find" over a hundred allegedly orphaned registry entries and
dozens of purportedly "suspicious" files, making it clearly a worthless
product, in this regard. (Not that any registry cleaner can ever be
anything but worthless, as they don't serve any useful purpose, to start
with.)
CCleaner's only real strength, and the only reason I use it, lies
in its usefulness for cleaning up unused temporary files from the hard
drive; as a registry "cleaner," it's not significantly better or worse
than any other snake oil product of the same type.
--
Bruce Chambers
Help us help you:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/555375
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
P
philo
victoratsympatico.ca said:I am thinking of buying a registry cleaner. Any recommendations of
which one may be best. Thanks.
Vic
First off do not waste your money...
there is no reason to buy one.
There are plently of free ones out there if you really feel you need one...
but there is not much chance one will actually do anything to improve the
performance
of your machine...
OTOH: You might do some damage!
S
Shenan Stanley
victoratsympatico.ca said:I am thinking of buying a registry cleaner. Any recommendations of
which one may be best.
How confident are you in your personal ability to remove any given item from
the registry and/or add something to the registry? Can you do the job
without the registry maintenance utility?
If the answer is *no*, then you should save your money (and/or your
bandwidth) and not get a registry maintenance utility.
For most - even if the answer is yes - you should save your money (and/or
your bandwidth) and not get a registry maintenance utility.
Why? It it gives you little to nothing in return and can cause more trouble
than it's worth (that includes if it was free.)
Don't take the risk - why should you?
What is it you expect t gain from 'cleaning' the registry? If it is speed
and performance - forget it. Although there have been times where removing
an entry or three might make a difference because that entry was loading
something and needed to timeout/etc - but those are few and far between and
better fixed in other ways or when specifically told to do so.
If you feel it is just something you *NEED* to do... Go for it.
http://www.larshederer.homepage.t-online.de/erunt/
K
Karl Snooks
Vic,
Two come to mind. Incidentally, I've used both and never had any
ill-effects from either and they have, how I do not know, eliminated some
unusual problems.
You will hear horror stories from many and there is no doubt a reason, but I
personally find them useful and they eliminate the entries which deleted
programs failed, either by design or not, to remove.
The two are:
CCleaner from Piriform and Registry Booster 2 from Uniblue.
karl snooks
Two come to mind. Incidentally, I've used both and never had any
ill-effects from either and they have, how I do not know, eliminated some
unusual problems.
You will hear horror stories from many and there is no doubt a reason, but I
personally find them useful and they eliminate the entries which deleted
programs failed, either by design or not, to remove.
The two are:
CCleaner from Piriform and Registry Booster 2 from Uniblue.
karl snooks
J
JS
Not a good idea.
I very recently ran a registry cleaner knowing in advance what some of the
fixes the cleaner would suggested.
This was based on the fact I had uninstalled an application (knowing it
would leave some orphaned registry entries) and then reinstalled the same
application to a different directory location.
The cleaner's default suggested fix for the application's old directory
location (the orphaned entries) was to change these entries to the new
location, which was not necessary, so I manually deleted these entries.
Now here is where a registry cleaner could cause a real problem!
A few months ago I removed a large number of the $NtUninstallKBxxxxxx$ files
(these are the files and folders left behind each time you install the
latest Windows Updates each month)
The cleaner reported the broken registry entries but the suggested fix was
to point the entries to remaining $NtUninstall files (on a random basis)
which I had not removed (the most recent 4 months of updates/patches) thus
royally screwing up the pointers. By that I mean you go to uninstall (in
rare cases) a patch that may be giving you problems and due to the screwed
up registry entry it instead removes the wrong patch.
JS
I very recently ran a registry cleaner knowing in advance what some of the
fixes the cleaner would suggested.
This was based on the fact I had uninstalled an application (knowing it
would leave some orphaned registry entries) and then reinstalled the same
application to a different directory location.
The cleaner's default suggested fix for the application's old directory
location (the orphaned entries) was to change these entries to the new
location, which was not necessary, so I manually deleted these entries.
Now here is where a registry cleaner could cause a real problem!
A few months ago I removed a large number of the $NtUninstallKBxxxxxx$ files
(these are the files and folders left behind each time you install the
latest Windows Updates each month)
The cleaner reported the broken registry entries but the suggested fix was
to point the entries to remaining $NtUninstall files (on a random basis)
which I had not removed (the most recent 4 months of updates/patches) thus
royally screwing up the pointers. By that I mean you go to uninstall (in
rare cases) a patch that may be giving you problems and due to the screwed
up registry entry it instead removes the wrong patch.
JS
L
Laughingstar~*
How would "we" know if there were problems with it or not, until its too
late...? Just a thought.
late...? Just a thought.
L
Laughingstar~*
Bruce, interjecting a query, here, I'm fearful they're just a form of "legal
grayware.." and access the Internet w/o my knowledge. "legal" is loosely
stated, only MHO.
grayware.." and access the Internet w/o my knowledge. "legal" is loosely
stated, only MHO.
K
Ken Blake, MVP
I am thinking of buying a registry cleaner.
Bad thought.
Any recommendations of
which one may be best. Thanks.
The best registry cleaner is no registry cleaner. Registry cleaning
programs are *all* snake oil. 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.
R
Rich
Ken Blake said:Bad thought.
The best registry cleaner is no registry cleaner. Registry cleaning
programs are *all* snake oil. 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.
Two questions:
1) Would a registry compactor be useful?
2) If all Windows registry cleaners are snake oil, why did Microsoft release
Regclean (sp?) albeit unsupported?
Thanks,
Richy
C
Chuck
"Long ago and far away" --- Regclean was a useful tool. As the registry
became more complex, it became outmoded. Since it was not
updated/modified/supported, it became quite useless for newer windows
versions.
"If all Windows registry cleaners are snake oil, why did Microsoft release
Regclean (sp?) albeit unsupported?"
became more complex, it became outmoded. Since it was not
updated/modified/supported, it became quite useless for newer windows
versions.
"If all Windows registry cleaners are snake oil, why did Microsoft release
Regclean (sp?) albeit unsupported?"
A
Alan Edwards
1) No, though it may have been for Windows 95.
2) That was for a different operating system (Windows 95) and was so
cautious, it was hardly worth using and only operated on one hive,
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT
....Alan
2) That was for a different operating system (Windows 95) and was so
cautious, it was hardly worth using and only operated on one hive,
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT
....Alan
K
Ken Blake, MVP
Two questions:
1) Would a registry compactor be useful?
No. It's not at all needed.
2) If all Windows registry cleaners are snake oil, why did Microsoft release
Regclean (sp?) albeit unsupported?
You'll have to ask Microsoft. I don't know.
V
VanguardLH
in message
Do you have a backup & restore plan in place? When (and not if) the
registry cleaner corrupts your registry and when you can no longer
boot into Windows, just how are you going to restore that OS partition
so it is usable again? Even if you use a registry cleaner that
provides for backups of its changes so you can revert back to the
prior state, how are you going to perform that restore if you cannot
boot the OS after hosing over its registry? What about entries in the
registry that look to be orphaned under the current OS load instance
but are used under a different OS environment? You delete what looks
orphaned only to find out that they are required under a different
environment.
Say there was an unusually high amount of orphaned entries in your
registry, like 4MB. By deleting it, you would speed up how long it
takes Windows to load the registry's files when it starts up - by all
of maybe 1 second. Oooh, aaah. All that risk of modifying the
registry to save maybe a second, or less, during the Windows startup.
Most folks that clean the registry end up deleting only 10KB, or less.
They are doing nothing to improve their Windows load time. Since the
registry is only read from the memory copy of it, and since memory is
random access, there is no difference to read one byte of the registry
(in memory) from the another byte in the registry (in memory). The
extra data in memory for orphaned entries has no effect on the time to
retrieve items from the memory copy of the registry.
Cleaning the registry will NOT improve performance in reading from the
memory copy of the registry. The reduced size of the registry's .dat
files might reduce the load time of Windows by all of a second and
probably much less. And you want to risk the stability of your OS for
inconsequential changes to its registry. The same boobs that get
suckered into these registry cleanup "tools" are the same ones that
get suckered into the memory defragment "tools".
A registry cleaner should only be used if you yourself can correctly
cleanup the registry. The cleaner is just a tool to automate the same
process but you should know every change that it intends to make and
understand each of those changes. After all, and regardless of the
stagnant expertise coded into the utility, *YOU* are the final
authority in what registry changes are performed whether you do it
manually or with a utility.
I am thinking of buying a registry cleaner. Any recommendations of
which one may be best. Thanks.
Do you have a backup & restore plan in place? When (and not if) the
registry cleaner corrupts your registry and when you can no longer
boot into Windows, just how are you going to restore that OS partition
so it is usable again? Even if you use a registry cleaner that
provides for backups of its changes so you can revert back to the
prior state, how are you going to perform that restore if you cannot
boot the OS after hosing over its registry? What about entries in the
registry that look to be orphaned under the current OS load instance
but are used under a different OS environment? You delete what looks
orphaned only to find out that they are required under a different
environment.
Say there was an unusually high amount of orphaned entries in your
registry, like 4MB. By deleting it, you would speed up how long it
takes Windows to load the registry's files when it starts up - by all
of maybe 1 second. Oooh, aaah. All that risk of modifying the
registry to save maybe a second, or less, during the Windows startup.
Most folks that clean the registry end up deleting only 10KB, or less.
They are doing nothing to improve their Windows load time. Since the
registry is only read from the memory copy of it, and since memory is
random access, there is no difference to read one byte of the registry
(in memory) from the another byte in the registry (in memory). The
extra data in memory for orphaned entries has no effect on the time to
retrieve items from the memory copy of the registry.
Cleaning the registry will NOT improve performance in reading from the
memory copy of the registry. The reduced size of the registry's .dat
files might reduce the load time of Windows by all of a second and
probably much less. And you want to risk the stability of your OS for
inconsequential changes to its registry. The same boobs that get
suckered into these registry cleanup "tools" are the same ones that
get suckered into the memory defragment "tools".
A registry cleaner should only be used if you yourself can correctly
cleanup the registry. The cleaner is just a tool to automate the same
process but you should know every change that it intends to make and
understand each of those changes. After all, and regardless of the
stagnant expertise coded into the utility, *YOU* are the final
authority in what registry changes are performed whether you do it
manually or with a utility.
D
dairyman
Laughingstar~* said:How would "we" know if there were problems with it or not, until its too
late...? Just a thought.
What is it with people and registry cleaners? If he/she is looking for a registry cleaner
then that's fine. As long as they know how to open REGEDIT and backup the registry in case
the registry cleaner does damage.
D
dairyman
Chuck said:"Long ago and far away" --- Regclean was a useful tool. As the registry
became more complex, it became outmoded. Since it was not
updated/modified/supported, it became quite useless for newer windows
versions.
"If all Windows registry cleaners are snake oil, why did Microsoft release
Regclean (sp?) albeit unsupported?"
Damn good point. Also, they now have the Windows Live OneCare online registry cleaner.