Registry Cleaners: Boon or Boondoggle?

How to Clean Your Windows Registry and Speed Up Your PC​

SOURCE: PC World - How to Clean Your Windows Registry and Speed Up Your PC



A cluttered Registry can slow Windows to a crawl, but cleaning it up effectively isn't easy. Steve Bass reviews some of the leading Registry cleaners, and offers tips to help you get your Registry down to size and improve your PC's performance.
Steve Bass, PC World


Let's start with a little quiz. I say "Big, bloated, and full of errors." What do you say? Right, "Windows Registry." One more: "Messing with it is risky." If you guessed the Registry again, you pass. While fooling around with your Windows Registry does involve some risk, cleaning it out can have an impact on your PC's overall performance.

The Windows Registry is an essential system file that houses a massive collection of details about your computer--where programs are stored, which helper programs (known as DLLs) are shared among your various applications, listings of all your Start-menu shortcuts, and pointers to the programs that fire up when you click on an icon. And that's just the beginning.

Practically everything you do in Windows is recorded somewhere in the Registry. For instance, the URL for this article probably has an entry now. The paths to the last dozen or so images or documents you opened are there, too, as are the details of the programs you most recently installed or uninstalled.

Here's the problem: If you pry open the Registry, you'll probably find it about as cluttered as a teenager's bedroom. That's because Windows doesn't efficiently clean up after itself as it goes about its daily business. It constantly creates new entries, but seldom--if ever--removes them after they're no longer needed.

Compounding that problem are applications that are too inept to uninstall all of the Registry entries they create; far too often, program upgrades and installers leave unneeded pointers in the Registry. So the Registry becomes bloated with unnecessary entries, slowing down your system.


Registry Cleaners: Boon or Boondoggle?

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Top Ten Registry Dos (and Don'ts)

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Registry Cleaners: How They Fared

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[Bare Foot Kid]

Hello Brink!

Thanks, this is very useful.









Later Ted

 

[z3r010]

Registry cleaners are just potentially harmful snake oil IMHO

 

[Bare Foot Kid]

Yeah, I have really messed up a couple of installs 'experimenting' with them ...

Hehehe!










Later Ted

 

[Brink]

Strange. I have never had a registry cleaner mess up my system. Of course, I always go over the results before I let it delete them. I also let the program create a backup of the deleted registry entires to restore later if needed. I usually keep the backups for about a week to make sure there are not any ill effects from the results being deleted from the registry before deleting the backups.

 

[Bare Foot Kid]

Hello Shawn!

They always told me I was like a bull in a china shop, rushing in without looking.
But that's half the fun of 'experimenting'; to learn what NOT to do first.
Then learning what to do is the easy part ... hehehe!







Later Ted

 

[rtt_77388]

In the XP days, they did wonders for performance. Although I do use Registry Clean Expert on Vista, I haven't noticed any noticable gain in performace or stability. Old habits die hard.

 

[WildEagle]

The registry cleaner in Fix It Utilities is good for deleting stuff it shouldn't and messing up one's system.

 

[tanuj_chadha]

Registry cleaners are easy to install but a pain to uninstall. . . . . . . . . .

 

[Brink]

Hi Tanuj,

Strange, you usually should be able to uninstall them from Programs & Features without any problems. What program did you have trouble uninstalling?

 

[KrossX]

I used to use Reg Cleaners, never checked the complete list of reg keys to be removed (too many for my health). The last one I was using did fairly well, untill some functions in the OS started to .... disappear. Then I just never used them again, nor recomend them either.

I never felt the need to use them once started to use XP x64, and same with Vista.

 

[johngalt]

The registry cleaner in Fix It Utilities is good for deleting stuff it shouldn't and messing up one's system.

*any* reg cleaner can do this if you don't know what you are doing, or don't pay attention.

For example, I ran CCLeaner on a brand new Vista x64 install - not a lot found in the registry (I didn't clean anything, just analyzed for posterity's sake). Then I installed SP1 and checked again - now there are several 'missing' help files, several unused file extensions, and a bevy of other stuff. I knew better than to remove those as they were not there before SP1 and only SP1 was installed, so they were created by SP1 - and far be it for me to try to remove something that SP1 'installed' or 'fixed' in my registry.

I first got familiar with registry cleaning with the Norton Registry Cleaner app that came with Norton Utilities back in the day. Back when their Disk Defragmenter app (dd) was top notch, and just after they had removed that Disk editor utility because of the way Win XP worked.

I knew many people that set it to automatically 'fix' entries, but I decided to manually look through my set of entries - all 200+ - and half of the time the default fix (which was the first of usually 2 or 3 suggested fixes) was correct, and half of the time it was completely wrong - and I only discovered this after it tried to change the location of a help file for an app I had to some other totally different apps help file.

From that day I realized something - no computer application can be smarter than me and my eyes.

Registry cleaners are easy to install but a pain to uninstall. . . . . . . . . .

Yes, as Brinks asked, which ones did you have issues uninstalling? I have not had any such issues yet, but then again, I don't install them on my machines, so...

I used to use Reg Cleaners, never checked the complete list of reg keys to be removed (too many for my health). The last one I was using did fairly well, untill some functions in the OS started to .... disappear. Then I just never used them again, nor recomend them either.

I never felt the need to use them once started to use XP x64, and same with Vista.

Amen. After a while I realized that orphans in the registry are just there - like trying to clean up duplicate files - sure you'll get a bit of space back, but if you're not talking full 700 MB ISO files, what's the point?

 

[roy69]

I have never used a cleaner on Vista, I did use one on XP when I had that and found a small improvement.

 

[WildEagle]

What Fix It Utilities did when I tried it years ago on XP, is it deleted stuff for Roxio's cd burning program and a few other things, which as I recall included a key system entry in the registry.

There was an article besides the recent PC World article that showed most registry cleaners aren't worth it, within the past few years.

The only registry cleaner that I've come across that doesn't cause me any problems, is the registry cleaner in TuneUp Utilities.

 

[s99]

I use CCleaner and i've never double checked the list of registry issues before deleting them!
Moreover, i delete all of the registry issues!

Never had any probs!!:D

 

[mike-cow]

Ccleaner is unreliable and dangerous as far as I am concerned.

nCleaner does the trick for me. I don't use it unless I have some problems though, they are repairtools not regular maintenance tools for me, since they very rarely give any improvement.

I do let Auslogics registry defrag compact my registry every now and then though, because it reduces the size of the registry quite significantly. Don't know if it's really necessary, but it feels better to know it's not a huge lump of wasted space.

 

[usmc_nam_vet]

I guess I live a charmed life I have been cleaning and defragging the registry for year. Haven't screwed things up but ? times. Sorry I don't have enough fingers and toes to count that high. However when it works it seems to speed things up. I usually use a file cleaner and spyware remover at the same time so I can't say for certain it helps but I want to believe it did as I paid good money for it. Also can't say that it does any better than CCCleaner at doing it's job.

 

[SIW2]

Hi John,

Yes, doubtful if it makes any real difference, but cleaning and defragging the registry is very satisfying.

I also got Steve's mail on this subject - most people will want to clean the registry because there's so much stuff out there claiming it will cure all kind of ills and give you a massive performance boost. Also most all-in one tools come with a cleaner built in.

Interesting that Auslogics reg defrag., Quicksys reg defrag. ( which I use ), and the one built into GlaryUtilities ( which I have been playing around with recently since version 2.6 onwards is x64 compatible ) all give the same analysis and results.

Contrast that with the varied analysis you get from regcleaners - even when you run some of them twice.

I use Wise Registry Cleaner - looked at a few and this seemed consistent on repeat analysis, less aggressive than some, gives plenty of info. and and can be set to automatically create a backup. I use the default settings and have never had any problems.

Does it make my machine any quicker? Probably not, but at least I feel like I have a clean machine.

http://regdefrag.com/
http://wisecleaner.com/
http://glarysoft.com/
http://auslogics.com/en/

SIW2

 

[johngalt]

Then, i guess it is a matter of subjective versus objective. I look at things purely objectively. I distrust what I feel and trust what I can measure.

 

[mike-cow]

I guess I live a charmed life I have been cleaning and defragging the registry for year. Haven't screwed things up but ? times. Sorry I don't have enough fingers and toes to count that high. However when it works it seems to speed things up. I usually use a file cleaner and spyware remover at the same time so I can't say for certain it helps but I want to believe it did as I paid good money for it. Also can't say that it does any better than CCCleaner at doing it's job.

Interesting, but I would appreciate if you could say which software you're talking about here?

If you're referring to nCleaner, I'd just like to point out that I don't use the registry cleaner feature of nCleaner, it doesn't really give any performance I've noticed. I have successfully used it to get rid of odd crashes and such though, but I don't trust it enough to run it regularly even if I never had any issues yet. (Likely because I don't use it so frequently )

If you're referring to Auslogics Registry Defrag, I do run it fairly regularly (about once/month or so), and never had any problems. I can't say I see any performance gain by using it, but I like to think that I avoid performance degradation... And as long as I don't get any problems I don't see a problem with using it...

... Also, these apps are *free*, so the point of them being snakeoil or not is kind of moot. The question is if they BREAK things....

There's always reason to be careful with all things claiming to boost your computer though, since things that REALLY gives a boost is likely to make the system unstable.

Lowering the delay on the start menu is NOT a way to speed up your computer, even though it easily can be interpreted as such.