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Has anyone tried Perfect Utilities ?

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joiwind:
I must be chicken too - that's why I asked first before trying it myself. Well, maybe not chicken, just wary.

cranioscopical:
Call me chicken (this is where Chris leaps in!)
-Carol Haynes (September 08, 2009, 03:31 PM)
--- End quote ---
I had a response ready but, at the last moment, I decided to pullet.

Innuendo:
Never hurts to be chicken/wary when it comes to reg cleaners. If you don't know what a registry key does or doesn't do it's best to leave it be. A lot of keys are very cryptic in their function & when deleted wreak havoc on one's system. What's worse is that there are a LOT of reg cleaners out there (and I'm not saying the one referenced in this thread is one of them) that just nuke things willy-nilly and then one ends up with some non-functional programs at best and a non-functional OS at worst.

Carol Haynes:
I continue to bang the old drum - "you don't gain anything much by using any registry cleaners but you stand to lose a hell of a lot".

OK that isn't totally true. I do poke around in my registry and delete things I know don't need to be there but almost all reg cleaners are designed to maximise the number of items that can be hit (so they look impressive) and don't focus on the items that should be hit. The other big problem I have found in the past (and it is still true today) - if you have any version of MS Office installed there are hundreds of registry entries that reg cleaners want to remove from a fresh install - if you allow it to happen then somewhere down the road there will be trouble.

The same goes for windows itself - try doing a clean install of windows in a virtual machine and then run a registry cleaner - there are hundreds of entries to be deleted before you have done anything at all. I know MS aren't prefect but it is a little far fetched that all of these entries should be removed on a clean, fresh installation.

IMHO if a registry entry is no longer valid (i.e. something has been left behind following an uninstall) then chances are that no application is ever going to look at that key again. It might give a warm glow to know you have deleted the key but it will not make any practical difference to your system in terms of speed or registry size.

Comparisons I read also showed that defragging your registry has almost no impact on speed (but can cause problems with in use entries getting lost or corrupted in the process).

My poultry reference above was actually not so much to do with registry cleaning in Perfect Utilities but some of the other system cleaning tools. I am fairly happy letting CCleaner delete a load of stuff because experience tells me that so long as you select carefully what is deleted it doesn't seem to do any damage. Other file cleaning tools I have tried have not been quite so conservative!

cmpm:
what i've noticed is cleaning temp files helps the most

with xp 2003, i use registry cleaners-Regseeker and Ccleaner

now i'm using xp media center and tried a registry clean
it did not go well
when i finally got it from my son and reformated
reinstalled the system
i ran reg cleaners just to see what would happen
i had to reformat and reinstall

so i agree Carol that regcleaning is trouble
and i won't do it on the xp media center

one thing interesting is the 2003 xp is on a pentium 3
and cleaning the registry helped
but not on the media center

i experimented a lot on the p3
so i do see good results with that system

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