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Registry Cleaning Software

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scorp:
My own take is that a registry defragmenter is useful, but really, cleaning the registry?
Any stat on how much room in kb is being saved? And, without a reg defrag, the space is still allocated, just has no entry. I wouldn't expect that would speed anything up as the tree is still X size.

I share Carol's opinion and experience, I've had very lousy results with registry cleaners/doctors/fixers. And many of them show up much later.
-GHammer (December 20, 2005, 08:43 PM)
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Norton win doctor is my main cleaner and is safe to use as it appears not to be a deep scanner like the one in the link below or the topic starter ,i have yet to have a prob with it in stuffing my comp up(i found out the hardway) and it's 2 years now,how many mb does it save on the disk i can't say as neither apps give an amount,what i do see is a large list of obsolete keys,folders,shortcuts etc from installs and uninstalls,tho when it comes to a system sweep cc shows the mb you can save

http://www.ccleaner.com/


EDIT: If and when one does a backup and lets say you decide to do a full system backup it pays to have a spare HDD to test it on the last thing you want is for there to be a corruption on one of the backup disks and cannot continue (it maybe possable to make a clone of the faulty disk and with luck it may work) or you'll end up doing yet another windows install...lol... best backup is cloning from one HDD to another

mouser:
If and when one does a backup and lets say you decide to do a full system backup it pays to have a spare HDD to test it on the last thing you want is for there to be a corruption on one of the backup disks and cannot continue (it maybe possable to make a clone of the faulty disk and with luck it may work) or you'll end up doing yet another windows install...lol... best backup is cloning from one HDD to another
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i could not agree with this more.
i'll only add that having a spare hard drive / computer to "test" a restore on has the MAJOR advantage of being able to test out a restore procedure before an emergency actually happens.

in fact, with the price of computers these days, you could almost justify buying yourself a very low-powered spare computer for just this purpose, experimenting, testing software, testing restore procedures, etc.

very good idea for the new year.

scorp:
My bad i forget that some may not tinker with dual HDD's on the one comp and yes it would be necessary to have another comp,that aside and a little off topic but a forum member may need help one day take a gander at the site below

http://www.radified.com/

EDIT: The green page from that link will auto direct you ,just wait a mo then look for the link at right for the forums,any cloning queries you have they can help

Baseman:

I have been using Registery First Aid for some time now and find that it's excellent...Becareful when cleaning up  the registry...You might just wind up with a Systems crash...Ask me I know...

superticker:
I have been using Registry First Aid for some time now and find that it's excellent....-Baseman (January 06, 2006, 11:52 PM)
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I've been using Registry First Aid since version 3.1.  It's now on version 5.0.1.  It has been excellent for me.  I never had a crash and never had to roll any RegEdit backups.  Well ... there was a System Restore once, but that was many years ago.

Registry First Aid won't fix any entries unless you approve them, so you stay in complete control.  It also will rank the safety of each proposed fix Green, Yellow, or Red.

My only gripe is when I first ran it, there must have been over 1000 registry errors.  It took me 2.5 afternoons to look at each one of those.  Most can be fixed or deleted easily, but some require 3-5 minutes of research even when you know what you're doing.

It does provide quick registry-key links to RegEdit for doing the research as well as the file directory tree, but you still need to figure out what some installer (or uninstaller) couldn't figure out for itself.  This takes study, even on a system that you are familiar with.  I guess, if all the fixes were straight forward, you wouldn't need the registry in the first place.  :P

The Platinum version will also compress the registry.

It also has a feature to search out obsolete software entries.  For example, after uninstalling AOL, there are still 100s of AOL entries lurking in the registry.  You can have it search out the string "AOL" to find those entries, then determine if they're safe to delete.

AOL is so inter-woven into the registry that tracking down all its references for deletion purposes is hard.  I just don't have time to do it.  But if someone has written a smart uninstaller that can track down latent AOL reg entries automatically, please let me know about it.  I got latent entries for AOL client 7.0 & 9.0.

Cleaning and compressing the registry does make the computer operate somewhat faster.  I've been meaning to get Microsoft's book on the registry, but haven't had time as yet.

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