Registry cleaners

[Jim Hawkins]

Can anyone recommend a good free registry cleaner for Windows XP ?

[Andy Burns]

I can recommend not using one.

[Jim Hawkins]

Because they're all no good or because they're unnecessary ?

[Adrian C]

No doubt a queue of responses that Linux boot CD will do the job, and so will DBAN ;-p

FWIW I've never put a windows PC in such a mess that it requires a registry cleaner (which I regard as snake oil), but if you are frequently finding that necessary maybe you might be better off investigating either running prebuilt images of the OS and base applications that can be rolled back, or split the load into several virtual machines?

A *free* registry cleaner that can be wholly trusted to make decisions about what stored registry information is needed or not. Hmmm.. Tricky.

[John Rumm]

Unless you have done something serious to the thing[1], then they are usually not worth running.

JV16 Power tools from:

a trial version (full featured, time limited) that has some quite good registry tools like batch search and replace etc.

[1] Never had cause to need one until recently - Then I swapped out what I thought was a failing Mobo, only to discover eventually it was a failing SSD drive (but failing in an odd way). Ended up needing to do a HAL and mass driver swap, whole bunch of drive reallocations (including changing the system drive letter (not recommended)) on a machine that had lots of "history" (i.e. it was a Cyrix DX2 80 machine with Win 95 at one point, and had been through multiple updates of hardware and OS over the years!)). The above came in handy for dealing with the 13,000 odd reg entries that were pointing at the old system disk, and a whole bunch of apps that moved drive as well.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Ubuntu?

:-)

>

[Andy Burns]

Mainly the latter, I suppose there's also scope for the former, have known a number of home users who endlessly felt the need to run them, while my previous laptop ran the same install of XP for 6 years without needing "cleaning", indeed most business users can't/don't run them.

[John Williamson]

They can be useful when you have a specific problem. Otherwise, if it ain't broke...

[David in Normandy]

Exactly. I'm a software developer and I've had people contact me with problems after having used a registry cleaner because it has ripped out some or all of the registry settings for my software.

I can see it being an issue that some software products leave behind a lot of settings in the registry after they have been unistalled. However, there is no hard information that links those registry settings to deleted software anyway so any registry cleaning software is guessing what registry entries can and cannot be deleted. When it guesses wrong expect things to go wrong with your operating system or application software or for those things to become unstable in various circumstances.

Registry cleaning is a can of worms best left unopened.

[Brian Gaff]

Euing free registry cleaner is pretty harmless but effective. The one in ccleaner is not bad and much faster. The point is registry cleaning only really works if you do other things too, like removing all temp files, defragging the drive and optimising the registry after its been cleaned. Then you notice some speed benefits and less funnies, but otherwise, registry cleaning on its own can just fragment it eventually making things go slower in my experience. also of course beware of damaged uninstalls or other software. these are often the cause of very nasty problems like files not being able to be loaded properly or control panel applets that crash windows.

You can remove a lot of this with the revo uninstaller, but then you may need to clean install the offending program etc. Brian

[Brian Gaff]

Not helpful without your reasons. I say don't use really aggressive ones as they can foul up, but good ones may not always improve things but most certainly do not make them worse unless you have underlying messed up program installs etc, probably best removed and reinstalled. Brian

[Brian Gaff]

I'd like to say a word about Erunt which backs up the registry and in xp is often more reliable to fix problems that system restore.

Brian

[Brian Gaff]

As I say, good ones can speed things up, but bad ones can screw things up. Pretty obvious really.

Brian

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo , Brian Gaff escribió:

+1. It backs up my XP registry at 0300 every morning.

The companion progran, NTREGOPT, is also good. It compacts the registry but doesn't change or delete any keys.

I've been burned once too often by registry cleaners. Sometimes they seem to work, but after a reboot subtle but annoying things happen.

For example, I can launch Firefox from the command line with "start firefox". After cleaning the registry with CCleaner, accepting its recommendations, this no longer works.

[charles]

I had one from UniBlue which kept removing my CD/DVD from the system.

[Chris Bartram]

Indeed. It's better to just not install all the shit that makes you think you need a registry cleaner.

[Terry Fields]

CCleaner is available here:

Defraggler here:

I ran CCleaner on SWMBO's laptop, it got rid of a 1GB of rubbish.

Defraggler took some time to do its work as the disk was well fragmented.

Both products have a good reputation; I've been using them both for years.

CCleaner now has a free-space/whole-disk wiping tools as well as other useful features.

Highly recommended

Terry Fields

[Ian Jackson]

In message , Terry Fields writes

I've been using CCleaner for a long time, and I can't say it's done any harm. However, I can't say it's done a lot of good - apart from obviously removing a regular accumulation of rubbish.

Mind you, it keeps finding things to delete which I can't understand why they got there - things long since installed or deleted, or not used for ages - and even things I have absolutely no idea where they came from.

I also recently ran Defraggler. All I can say is that it worked - but it didn't free up any disk space (probably because it was only 10% fragmented in the first place).

[John Rumm]

Even the "good" ones can be bad in some cases. The difficulty is knowing when.

The difficulty is that they need to make arbitrary decisions about stuff that will quite often turn out to be wrong or sub optimal. The speed gain will in general be marginal, however implications of them making the wrong choices can be significant.

Say for example you have a bunch of file associations that are pointing at a non existant application or folder. Most will simply delete them all rather than identifying if the application in question has actually been moved to another location.

[Mr Pounder]

+1