What would be the best software to buy to fix and clean the registry for Windows XP Professional?
There's a wide variety of opinion on registry cleaners. Many people believe that they're important tools to keep your system running smoothly.
My opinion's a little different.
I rarely use a registry cleaner. In fact, I've never actually felt that I've needed to use a registry cleaner. And I definitely install and play with random things on my machine on a regular basis.
My fundamental belief is that the best registry cleaner is no registry cleaner at all. Most people simply don't need it, and don't need to run one.
...
I am still using a old and safe cleaner program call RegCleaner which is a freeware but no longer supported,-Terry (July 19, 2006, 10:18 PM)
Since the best registry cleaners have a backup option, there's no problems if you delete a critical setting in the registry, restore the backup and it's done.-Lashiec (July 20, 2006, 07:27 AM)
ows registry is the tree structure, and many software design to "full explore" this function with each every information, configuration all stored into the registry, and the only result is slowing down the system.That's bull. Registry lookups are very efficient since binary search is used for looking up keys; this basically means that the number of keys has to double for one extra compare instruction to be necessary.-supertechnogeek (December 25, 2007, 08:27 PM)
This was my second attempt to repair my computers registry and thanks to your post, it’s FINALLY fixed. Perfect Optimizer worked on both my desktop and laptop computer. I will be recommending this best registry cleaner (http://www.bestregistrycleaner.net) to all my friends .-dangdang7262 (March 18, 2009, 08:48 AM)
I sound like a broken watch but registry cleaners are pointless and dangerous. So you have a few out of date entries knocking about (so what) and you probably have hundreds of unused entries installed by common applications such as Windows and Office (to name only two) that deliberately insert empty registry keys that are only filled when you download a particular plugin or what ever.
Just because you don't perceive immediate problems doesn't mean they don't appear down the line. The main problem is that by the time you have a problem you don't even think to blame the registry cleaner.-Carol Haynes (March 18, 2009, 01:23 PM)
I sound like a broken watch but registry cleaners are pointless and dangerous. So you have a few out of date entries knocking about (so what) and you probably have hundreds of unused entries installed by common applications such as Windows and Office (to name only two) that deliberately insert empty registry keys that are only filled when you download a particular plugin or what ever.Um... Actually I think it's "broken Record"... :) ...But either way I'll signup to sit with you on the replayed point as I agree completely.
Just because you don't perceive immediate problems doesn't mean they don't appear down the line. The main problem is that by the time you have a problem you don't even think to blame the registry cleaner.
I am not saying MS is perfect (I know they are not) but if you have a few minutes to spare try installing in VirtualPC Windows Vista or XP clean install (you don't need to activate it) and an MS Office product. Then run any of the registry cleaners and look at how many 'errors' exist on a newly installed system. Many cleaners will literally find hundreds.
I used to use JV Powertools but gave up after I noticed that in a multiboot system it was 'fixing' registry problems in automatic mode with files on the wrong partition (i.e. a different version of windows altogether).-Carol Haynes (March 18, 2009, 01:23 PM)
But either way I'll signup to sit with you on the replayed point as I agree completely.-Stoic Joker (March 20, 2009, 09:44 AM)
Brave Sir Robin ran away.
Bravely ran away, away!
When danger reared its ugly head,
He bravely turned his tail and fled.
Yes, brave Sir Robin turned about
And gallantly he chickened out.
Bravely taking to his feet
He beat a very brave retreat,
Bravest of the brave, Sir Robin!
He is packing it in and packing it up
And sneaking away and buggering up
And chickening out and pissing off home,
Yes, bravely he is throwing in the sponge...
btw folks the best 'cleaner' i know of is ATF-Cleaner
developed by a tech at geekstogo.com-cmpm (March 20, 2009, 03:14 PM)
yeah....learning is fun-cmpm (March 20, 2009, 09:30 PM)
Phil: doesn't have google hits for any full sentences and URL doesn't have referrer links...
/me shrugs.-f0dder (April 06, 2009, 04:29 AM)
Simpler solution is to install a virtual OS (there are loads of host options these days some free) and only test stuff in the virtual OS keeping your main OS clean of all the crap that accumulates.
Or, run your os in a sandbox. I swear by Returnil. Muck it up as much as you want then simply reboot and you are fresh again.Well, I do occasionally use a sandbox, but one problem is that you don't get an idea of how a piece of software behaves during bootup. I was testing one anti-malware program that worked fine...until I rebooted. It then apparently got into a pissing contest with my anti-virus program, with the result that I couldn't even complete the boot process. I've kept the anti-malware program on my system, but only to run scans, not to work in real time and not to start at startup. But testing it in a sandbox wouldn't have revealed this very important problem.-edbro (July 06, 2009, 03:42 PM)
...Likewise for me, virtual OS stuff seems more pain than it's worth....-MilesAhead (July 06, 2009, 04:20 PM)
Wondering .. was SAS involved in your unruly school children fight ?-Steven Avery (July 06, 2009, 05:33 PM)
As for registry cleaners, probably the best single thing to do is to uninstall with Revo Uninstaller rather than only Add/Remove. After each uninstall you will end up deleting a couple of paths and/or registry entries that would have been left over.
The situation with registry and drivers are similar .. when your system is running smooth and decent, a good way to bring that smooth running to a screeching halt is to do an auotmatic software-directed "cleaning" (registry) or a software-directed "update" (drivers). And the registry is the more dangerous of the two.I'm sufficiently superstitious that I don't want to declare publicly that I've never had a problem with my registry clearner, but... :)
All I know is that I'm forever installing and moving and renaming and uninstalling files/programs/whatever, and given how I use the computer, I tend to think that using a Registry Cleaner can be helpful. But I don't know enough to be certain about this.-cyberdiva
All I can tell you is of my own personal experiences. I am a software junkie. If I have a software need (yes, need, dang it!) I will relentlessly search till I have found every program that will fulfill that need & I will end up installing a bunch of those till I finally have the one I consider to be best.
There is no real reason to clean your registry unless you are OCD about it or there is something in there that is seriously screwing up your system. Since the registry is in a database format doing thinks like cleaning, optimizing, shrinking, compressing or whatever fancy names these programs put on their functions will not gain you any speed-up at all when your OS accesses it.Hear ye, hear ye!-Innuendo (July 06, 2009, 12:06 PM)
If you religiously monitor each installation with tools like Ashampoo Uninstaller or Total Uninstaller, you can easily wipe out everything that gets installed, including registry entries. I use Ashampoo and try to monitor each new installation.-edbro (July 07, 2009, 08:06 AM)
I think what we need is an automated gizmo to clone a mini-OS from the system partition, to a blank partition in like 10 minutes.-MilesAhead (July 11, 2009, 04:45 PM)
An alternative is to use VMWare which can build a virtual machine based on a physical installation.It's a damn shame it's so hard (https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=18293.0) (aka almost impossible) to go the other way, though - would be an extremely useful feature.-Carol Haynes (September 15, 2009, 03:38 AM)
Now let me say that I don't believe that Windows needs to have the registry cleaned up on a regular basis, or even just because you think it might need one for the heck of it.:up: :up: :up:-J-Mac (December 30, 2009, 10:44 PM)
I use JV16 quite a bit for much the same reason J-Mac described. It also has some nice functions related to file and disk management. I don't worry too much about trashing the registry because:
I've found it's very unlikely that JV16 will cause any damage if the "Fix" option is selected instead of the "Delete" option.
JV16 will optionally backup all changes it makes.-mrainey (December 31, 2009, 09:44 AM)
I use ERUNT to back up the registry every day, first thing in the morning. Takes thirty seconds.-mrainey (December 31, 2009, 09:44 AM)
I create a backup image weekly using BootIt NG. Takes twenty minutes.-mrainey (December 31, 2009, 09:44 AM)
I have always used ERUNT also - Department of Redundancy Department!! - but I haven't yet checked to see if it is compatible with Windows 7. Do you know, mrainey?
Must suck to be a spammer and then not be able to insert a link properly.;D-Bamse (January 16, 2010, 12:37 AM)
Eric P. Martinez (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ei=fmlRS5-BNMGLkAWJoYXACQ&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=1&ct=result&cd=1&ved=0CCQQBSgA&q=eric+martinez+registry+easy&spell=1) is a registry cleaner expert.
If you religiously monitor each installation with tools like Ashampoo Uninstaller or Total Uninstaller, you can easily wipe out everything that gets installed, including registry entries. I use Ashampoo and try to monitor each new installation.-edbro (July 07, 2009, 08:06 AM)
Not a panacea in my experience - often applications build dependencies based upon the order in which things were installed (which is why sometime trying to uninstall an MS hotfix will wran you that it could break a specific list of applications that were installed after the Hotfix). The trouble with AU and TU is that they are blunt tools...-Carol Haynes (September 15, 2009, 03:38 AM)
The best way to clean the registry is to avoid polluting it.-Tuxman (January 31, 2010, 11:18 AM)
You can perfectly go through the city without being hit by a car. Leaving the house doesn't imply death.-Tuxman (January 31, 2010, 11:30 AM)
just be careful about what you install on your system.Right.-Darwin (January 31, 2010, 12:50 PM)
EDIT: corrected some atrocious grammatical errors introduced in my last edit!-Darwin (January 31, 2010, 12:50 PM)
EDIT: corrected some atrocious grammatical errors introduced in my last edit!-Darwin (January 31, 2010, 12:50 PM)
If you don’t want to make atrocious grammatical errors, don’t post!! 8) ;) :)
Jim-J-Mac (January 31, 2010, 02:09 PM)
Test-driving ‘free scan’ tune-up suites
By Fred Langa on August 8, 2012 in Top Story
(...) Just as with the previously-discussed tools, when I drilled down to examine these problems, some (such as junk files) were real, with most of the rest either exaggerated or simply wrong. (...) WinZip System Utilities Suite (and the other scanners discussed below) seems to deliberately inflate the seriousness of some items — for example, calling its own website’s harmless cookies “privacy traces.” (...)
(...) ... the software I test-drove for this article clearly seems aimed at inexperienced users who are more likely to purchase “repairs” when confronted with frightening reports of critical and numerous system problems.
Those, however, are relatively minor transgressions compared to reporting serious problems where none exist, such as flagging fully up-to-date drivers as “ancient.”
All of this seems designed to make your PC appear to be in dire need of paid-for repairs, when in fact there appear to be no real operational problems.
http://windowssecrets.com/top-story/test-driving-free-scan-tune-up-suites/-windowssecrets
I've used Ccleaner for years (including its "registry cleaner" -- and yes, I make a backup first), and it's never hosed any of my systems.^ ditto, and it seems to be very good at what it does.-kyrathaba (August 15, 2012, 08:13 PM)
I wonder when Microsoft will bring out their own.-Tuxman (August 16, 2012, 02:16 AM)
I've used Ccleaner for years (including its "registry cleaner" -- and yes, I make a backup first), and it's never hosed any of my systems.Why do you use it, though? Except for a few specialized situations, doing "registry cleanups" is almost entirely superfluous on NT based Windows versions. The space savings are negligible, and because of the data structures and algorithms involved in the registry, you're unlikely to see any speed gains.-kyrathaba (August 15, 2012, 08:13 PM)
Yesterday I saw that even WinZip has a registry cleaner. ;DYeah, and it's one of those foul scareware kind of things. Congratulations on Corel for totally ruining the WinZip brand - not that anybody should use that awful program when WinRAR and 7-zip are around.-Tuxman (August 16, 2012, 02:16 AM)
Why should anyone still use WinRAR?Because it's a decent piece of software that's decently priced. If you only need basic archive operation, you should probably go for 7-zip (it's file manager misses a few convenience things here and there which would annoy me in the long run, but it's good enough that I don't have WinRAR on my work laptop) - but WinRAR does have a bunch of additional features (NTFS streams and ACLs and pretty darn comprehensive command line features).-Tuxman (August 16, 2012, 02:23 PM)
That said, WinZip is still pretty good, it is only a bit too pricey.IMHO it sucks. The zip format, even with the various extensions that aren't universally supported, just isn't very good... and WinZip has become bloatware and it's GUI was never particularly good.-Tuxman (August 16, 2012, 02:23 PM)
NTFS streams and ACLsDo you really use them? I know no one who does.-f0dder (August 16, 2012, 03:21 PM)
and pretty darn comprehensive command line featuresWell...-f0dder (August 16, 2012, 03:21 PM)
7-Zip [64] 9.27 alpha Copyright (c) 1999-2012 Igor Pavlov 2012-06-02
Usage: 7z <command> [<switches>...] <archive_name> [<file_names>...]
[<@listfiles...>]
<Commands>
a: Add files to archive
b: Benchmark
d: Delete files from archive
e: Extract files from archive (without using directory names)
h: Calculate hash values for files
l: List contents of archive
t: Test integrity of archive
u: Update files to archive
x: eXtract files with full paths
<Switches>
-ai[r[-|0]]{@listfile|!wildcard}: Include archives
-ax[r[-|0]]{@listfile|!wildcard}: eXclude archives
-bd: Disable percentage indicator
-i[r[-|0]]{@listfile|!wildcard}: Include filenames
-m{Parameters}: set compression Method
-o{Directory}: set Output directory
-p{Password}: set Password
-r[-|0]: Recurse subdirectories
-scs{UTF-8 | WIN | DOS}: set charset for list files
-sfx[{name}]: Create SFX archive
-si[{name}]: read data from stdin
-slt: show technical information for l (List) command
-so: write data to stdout
-ssc[-]: set sensitive case mode
-ssw: compress shared files
-t{Type}: Set type of archive
-u[-][p#][q#][r#][x#][y#][z#][!newArchiveName]: Update options
-v{Size}[b|k|m|g]: Create volumes
-w[{path}]: assign Work directory. Empty path means a temporary directory
-x[r[-|0]]]{@listfile|!wildcard}: eXclude filenames
-y: assume Yes on all queries
IMHO it sucks. The zip format, even with the various extensions that aren't universally supported, just isn't very good...You missed the .zipx format, obviously. Also, if you prefer WinRAR, remember that .rar is a proprietary format too.-f0dder (August 16, 2012, 03:21 PM)
For most of my files? No. But it's definitely nice being able to, say, archive up a htdocs/wwwroot folder with custom ACLs and indexing metadata.NTFS streams and ACLsDo you really use them? I know no one who does.-f0dder (August 16, 2012, 03:21 PM)-Tuxman (August 16, 2012, 03:38 PM)
Things like date/time specifiers in the output filename, and "clear Archive attribute" combined with "only add files with Archive attribute set". (Those are features I've used a fair amount - but it supports a lot more stuff from the command line, including features that can be useful for scripting).and pretty darn comprehensive command line featuresWhat exactly is it lacking for you?-f0dder (August 16, 2012, 03:21 PM)-Tuxman (August 16, 2012, 03:38 PM)
No, I didn't miss the ".zipx" format, it's those "not universally supported extensions". On a lot of platforms, zip support means info-zip zip/unzip, which doesn't handle those. And while RAR isn't open source, it does at least have source code for the decompression, with a liberal-enough license that it's a usable format. (Is there any source around for the zipx extensions yet, or just the half-assed "technote"?)IMHO it sucks. The zip format, even with the various extensions that aren't universally supported, just isn't very good...You missed the .zipx format, obviously. Also, if you prefer WinRAR, remember that .rar is a proprietary format too.-f0dder (August 16, 2012, 03:21 PM)-Tuxman (August 16, 2012, 03:38 PM)
And while RAR isn't open source, it does at least have source code for the decompression, with a liberal-enough license that it's a usable format.According to this logic, ZPAQ should be your format of choice: open-sourced and a high compression rate. 8)
It's really all about risk avoidance. For this reason, I would recommend using CCleaner or another reputable registry cleaner.You're more likely to run into trouble if you use a registry cleaner than if you don't. CCleaner might opt on the safe side, but still you're hardly going to prevent problems by running a registry cleaner (CCleaner can do other stuff as well, which might be more useful).-IainB (August 16, 2012, 05:21 PM)
...You're more likely to run into trouble if you use a registry cleaner than if you don't...-f0dder (August 16, 2012, 05:31 PM)
Getting rid of even one tedious housekeeping exercise (i.e., registry "cleaning") would be beneficial, and I certainly would not want to continue doing it if it actually increased risks, as you seem to be suggesting.It might not be a very large risk, when you use a cleaner that isn't overly aggressive - in that case, it's just a case of not really gaining anything, plus the (slightly theoretical) argument that it's more risk doing changes than not doing them.-IainB (August 17, 2012, 05:57 AM)
Are system/Registry cleaners worthwhile?
By Fred Langa on July 15, 2015 in Top Story
As Windows and third-party software have evolved over the years, Windows Secrets has periodically put various Registry- and system-cleanup products through their paces to examine the claims made by and about them.
For example, most cleanup software claims to streamline and shrink the Registry by removing obsolete, erroneous data and broken links stored there. Other products claim to do more, such as removing junk files, reducing boot times, and improving overall system performance.
Back in the days of Windows XP, third-party system cleaners were of real value in removing detritus from the operating system. But the current versions of Windows have many more built-in tuning and self-repair options. So do third-party cleaners still deliver any real-world benefit? Do they live up to their impressive claims?-Windows Secrets