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How the mighty have fallen: TuneUp Utilities 2010

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sajman99:
...The thing is TuneUp remains pretty much the only product in this category worth using... -Lashiec (October 31, 2009, 01:10 PM)
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A few years ago when I used TUU another well-regarded utility package was Ace Utilites. Not sure if that's still true today, but back then both were very nicely integrated packages--in particular, the registry cleaners of both were very reliable.

Eóin:
The Registry Optimizer *always* breaks MS Office 2003 installation
-tranglos (October 30, 2009, 06:58 PM)
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This is the reason why you show never let any program optimize the registry. Stay away from them all.

Carol Haynes:
The Registry Optimizer *always* breaks MS Office 2003 installation
-tranglos (October 30, 2009, 06:58 PM)
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This is the reason why you show never let any program optimize the registry. Stay away from them all.
-Eóin (October 31, 2009, 01:43 PM)
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There is a reason Microsoft Office always installs shortcuts in non standard ways and also a lot of blank 'stubs' in the registry. Almost every registry cleaner/optimizer zaps the lot and Office ceases to work properly. There are two fixes:

1) Run MS Office Repair
2) Don't use registry optimizers - they ALWAYS cause more problems than they solve.

Tuxman:
TuneUp Utilities are made for fixing errors they break themselves.

Seriously, no-one needs that. Autoruns, CCleaner and Brain 1.0 are more than enough. They don't install a bunch of unwanted stuff into your autostart menu, they are tiny, fast and free, and especially Brain 1.0 avoids you from installing weird applications which basically break something you'll need to fix then...

BTW, CCleaner's registry clean-up managed to fix my Windows Explorer once.

tranglos:
2) Don't use registry optimizers - they ALWAYS cause more problems than they solve.
-Carol Haynes (October 31, 2009, 02:01 PM)
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That's true, unfortunately. I never let TuneUp just go ahead and "fix" the registry. Every time I used that utility, I always went through the list of suggested fixes and manually unchecked everything that seemed like it was better left untouched. I'm not exactly a computer newbie, either. Even so, I always or nearly always managed to miss a few important entries, which TuneUp subsequently deleted.

With that experience, I have to agree with Carol. Just don't do it.

Those who, like myself, are slightly allergic to seeing leftover crappage in the registry, are better served manually deleting certain keys which are obviously not needed, such as product keys under HKCU/Software and HKLM/Software for apps that have been uninstalled. It's better not to toch anything under the HKLM(*) hive and under HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT.

That said, products such as TuneUp Registry Optimizer could be improved e.g. by having a "white list" of keys they should never touch, provided by the manufacturer. Just don't touch anything that might be related to Office, as long as TuneUp detects that a version of Office is still installed.

(*) Unless you absolutely have to: for example, if after uninstallation ThreatFire leaves behind its keyboard monitoring driver, which you then try to remove manually, and in doing so kill your keyboard entirely, so that uninstalling and reinstalling original keyboar drivers does not help. That's about the only time you need to start messing around in HKLM...

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