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Registry Cleaning Software

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zridling:
Not mine, but at InformationWeek Fred Langa has a nice review and test of ten Registry Cleaning Software programs. He points out common errors made by these apps, and as a spoiler, he likes the donationware program, EasyCleaner, which is simple, but quite effective.

     

Carol Haynes:
A better link to Fred's article (avoids formatting problems in Firefox) is http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=171203805

I must say I have abused my system with many registry cleaners over the years and have had many sad tales and total reinstalls as a result.

Golden rules I would use for registry cleaners are:


* Full system backup (preferably an easily restored image type) before using a cleaner - then when your system won't reboot you can get back to square one quickly.
* Only use a cleaner that has a built in backup and restore utility to manage changes made
* NEVER use automatic fixing - if you use Custom Fix settings and look at some of the suggestions for automatic fixing you will soon find out why
I really respect Fred Langa (if you haven't subscribed to his newsletter you should, www.langa.com) but Registry Cleaners are to be used with extreme caution.

Fred comes down in favour of one tool in the article (jv16 PowerTools) and this is a very good tool which as he points out has the merit of consistency. However even this one has its limitations - be prepared to spend a long time checking its Custom Fix options, especially if you haven't cleaned your system for a while and enjoy installing and unistalling programs a lot.

My bad instalation/uninstall habits meant when I ran jv16PT I have over 1400 High Risk registry errors. Closer inspection showed huge numbers of missing files (most of which turned out to be applications recording recently access files) - many of which did not need fixing, and some of the suggested fixes would silently have introduced very odd effects in my system.

Out of curiosity I backed up my system, and also did a quick full registry backup so thatI could just restore the registry if my system booted but exhibited odd behaviour. I then ran jv16PT and just hit fix. The first odd effect I noticed was that I could no longer click on URLs in programs and get them to open in a browser window !!!

FWIW use ... but with caution, and extremely conservatively!

zridling:
I can vouch for your reservations. I used RegSeeker in a test ONCE and it cleared out so many entries that my system didn't recognize half my software. Aye, but there's the reason for backups, for sure! Fortunately, I imported and was back to normal.

rrtwister:
Any recommendations on what to use (preferably donationware and EASY to figure out how to use) for doing hard drive backup? I admit that I am guilty of never doing back ups in windows. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

brotherS:
Any recommendations on what to use (preferably donationware and EASY to figure out how to use) for doing hard drive backup?
-rrtwister (October 11, 2005, 08:22 PM)
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Please start a new thread for this, it's an interesting topic and not related.

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