Registry Cleaners

[Frugal1ty]

i was doing some maintenance on my dad's computer and saw three virus protection, programs, six anti-spyware malware trojan programs, two person firewalls (not including windows), and a few registry cleaners.

for all that infectious related stuff i have programs that i'm familiar with, recommend and distribute to all my friends/family, but i don't have anything that for the registry (definitely looking for something free and unobtrusive). we all know how snappy windows can be on a fresh install; i assume if you can get decent results with a lil registry clean up along the way, that'd be nice too. what programs have you found effective?

 

[IHateMyJob2004]

Try MSFT OneStop. It's easy enough to try and it seemed to work on my PC. It's free if you use the internet version. Of course, CCleaner is what most here will recommend.

 

[Sam25]

Yup, +1 for CCleaner. Also, Eusing is another good free registry cleaner.

 

[CrazyLazy]

CCleaner is good/free

 

[ChAoTiCpInOy]

+1 for CCleaner

 

[MadAmos]

another :thumbsup: for ccleaner

 

[theAnimal]

Registry cleaners are not going to make any speed difference.

 

[lxskllr]

Originally posted by: theAnimal
Registry cleaners are not going to make any speed difference.

Yea, and there's also potential for them to cause problems. The chance is very small, but when compared to the benefits of using a registry cleaner(0), I don't see the point.

 

[dguy6789]

+1 CCleaner

 

[KoolDrew]

is there one you think is worth the effort?

No, it'll provide no benefit and most people should not be messing with the registry.

 

[Jaffacaique]

Another program that was rated in a recent pc mag (cannot remember the name) is nCleaner http://www.nkprods.com/ncleaner/ this program seems more thorough than CCleaner and hasn't caused me any problems in the last 2 months, works also with Vista 32bit....and best of all it is FREE (Caution when using any programs like these it always makes sense to have backups to fall back on should the worse happen)

 

[SoundTheSurrender]

My friend used some registry cleaner and it destroyed his windows os. Now it shows a black screen with a blinking underscore.

 

[corkyg]

My experience is that RegBooster by Uniblue is outstanding. It prepares a backup of the Registry before taking action, asnd if the result screws something up, you can easily revert to what it was.

 

[MadScientist]

What the OP should be asking is: Is a registry cleaner necessary? If you Google it you'll find, like the replies in this thread, mixed responses.
Quoting from Ed Bott's article "What possible performance benefits can you get from ?cleaning up? unneeded registry entries and eliminating a few stray DLL files? Even in the best-case scenario the impact should be trivial at best. Maybe a second or two here and there, maybe a few kilobytes of freed-up RAM, and I?m being generous. How can you balance those against the risk that the utility will ?clean? (in other words, delete) something you really need, causing a program or feature to fail?" He does though say later in the article that he will give Ccleaner a try.

I'm still on the fence on this. I have tried in the past Microsoft's Regclean (no longer supported) and recently Ccleaner with no ill effects, but have seen no difference in my computer's performance.

Microsoft has also included a registry scanner/cleaner in its Live OneCare package. You can get a free scan here: Link. You can customize the scan to do a virus/spyware, fragmentation, cleanup, registry, or open ports scans.

I'm not sure if this is going to be permanently free or if it's part of their 90 day trial of their Live OneCare. Link. I did not download their trial version and was still able to run a scan.