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Leonard Grey
Errare humanum est
PT Barnum was right. There's one born every second and your one of
them. Registry cleaners do absolutely nothing to improve computer
performance or to keep it in a good working order. At best they give
users a warm fuzzy feeling by making them think that removing a few
orphaned entries in the registry does something good and at worse they
bug up your computer. Your assertion that "All registry cleaners back
up the registry first" is admission enough by you that these cleaners do
at times cause problems, sometimes they cause problems that are serious
enough to prevent the computer from booting. Why on earth bother with
useless programs that can possibly damage your operating system while
giving zero benefits in return?
John
I was also thinking of a statement attributed to H.L. Mencken: "No one
ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people."
It's easy to blow holes in the advertising for registry cleaners. The
fact is, no one has published reliable before-and-after benchmarks
proving the claims attributed to registry cleaners. And no one will,
because it can't be done.
To put a finer point on the argument: Windows users sometimes /do/ need
to edit the Windows registry in order to solve a problem. Sometimes the
registry requires extensive editing to solve a problem. Much has been
written on the subject of whether the registry is the proper way to
store software configuration data in the first place.
The prerequisites to editing the registry in an intelligent manner are:
1- You have to know for a fact that registry keys or sub-keys are
causing a problem.
2- You have to know exactly which keys and sub-keys need editing and you
must know exactly what the correct data should be.
3- You have to know how to backup the registry, at least, although
knowing how to make an image of your system partition is better.
Registry cleaners can't do any of that although, to their credit, some
will perform at least a partial backup. A registry cleaner doesn't know
whether your computer has a problem to begin with, whether any problems
it does have are caused by incorrect information stored in the registry,
or which specific keys and sub-keys need to be edited and how. Only a
human being can make those decisions.
A registry cleaner simply goes through your registry, picking up
whatever it decides is 'wrong' by whatever criteria its programmers
chose, and then offer to 'fix' the mistakes.
Most of the time, the 'errors' a registry cleaner finds are not errors
in the first place and have zero impact on a computer's performance. So
it should come as no surprise when the actions taken by a registry don't
harm your computer. (Anyway, many of the keys they remove will just be
re-created the next time you restart your computer.)
Sometimes, the changes a registry cleaner makes are actually harmful to
your computer, because no registry cleaner can make the judgments that
an educated user can make about whether and how information stored in
the registry needs to be edited. When this happens, your computer can be
severely damaged, sometimes irreparably. We see examples of that all the
time in these newsgroups.
Furthermore, an improper change made to the registry may not impact your
computer until weeks or months later, when your computer finally tries
to access an erroneously changed or deleted registry key or sub-key. By
then, you've long forgotten which improper changes your registry cleaner
made that need to be 'undone' (if you even have that option.)
Is it any wonder, then, that registry cleaners are marketed to people
who don't have sufficient understanding of the registry, or of Windows
computing in general? This is evident from the unsubstantiated and often
humorous claims they make, which are akin to the advertising for diet
pills and the like that are hawked on late-night television and Sunday
radio.
Registry cleaners and similar 'fixit' programs are very popular because
computer users frequently, and often through no fault of their own, have
to deal with complex technology they do not understand. They don't
understand why their computers are not working properly, and they just
want an easy way to fix things. Nobody should blame them. Arrogant
software and hardware makers would rather point their figures at each
other than co-operate to give users the enjoyable experience they paid
for and deserve.
