Jackson said:
Kim Komando's tip of the day (07 Jan) has good words for
Microcraft's jv Power tools for cleaning the registry. I
believe it's freeware.
Has anyone used this program? Do you have any remarks or
recomendations?
Jack from Taxacola (formerly Pensacola), FL
- What is currently wrong or failing with the registry?
- What convinced you that the registry needs to be "cleaned" up?
- What constitutes the "cleaning" actions?
- What do you expect to gain from the cleanup?
- What are you going to do if the registry changes hose over
your computer since a restore may not be possible?
- What is your recovery strategy from the registry changes?
*_Why the uneducated or lazy should never use registry cleaners_*
If YOU are not adept at *manually* editing the registry, don't use a tool
that you don't understand regarding its proposed changes. Regardless of
relinquishing the task to software, YOU are the final authority in allowing
it to make the changes. Any registry cleaner that does not request for YOU
to give permission to make its proposed changes along with listing each
proposed change should be discarded.
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 the orphaned entries, 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 (also 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 because orphaned entries are never retrieved (if they
were, they aren't orphaned).
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 by 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 that is hard coded into the utility, *YOU* are the final authority
in what registry changes are performed whether you do it manually or with a
utility. If YOU do not understand the proposed change (which requires the
product actually divulge the proposed change before committing that change),
how will you know whether or not to allow that change?
I DO manually clean