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What's the best registry cleaner? Ask Leo says: none
Carol Haynes:
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)
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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 - they both remove everything that changed during the installation of the program irrespective of whether later applications rely on some of those components. In an ideal world the installation process and uninstallation process should keep track and avoid these problems but with the plethora of installer developers that are used this is very unlikely to happen in Windows. As far as I can see it would simply things enormously if the installation/unintsalltion/component registration and tracking were all standardised by MS so that proper monitoring of dependencies could be performed. The trouble is too many people would scream anti-trust these days but I would argue that managing installation and uninstallation of software should be a core function of an operating system - not the developer.
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)
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You can sort of do that - just use standard Partition Management software to clone a partition to spare disk space and then edit Boot.ini in XP or use BCDEdit in Vista/7 to create a new boot time entry which will make a bootable partition from it. Reboot your system and you can start up the second partition (your Windows may not be activated though - you'fd have to try it and see - I'd guess it might remain activated on the same drive but may not be on another physical drive, especially if it is a different manufacturer or drive type, eg PATA vs SATA).
An alternative is to use VMWare which can build a virtual machine based on a physical installation. You just tell it which partition to clone to build the VM. I'm not too sure what happens if you clone the currently running partiton though ;). I have to confess I haven't tried this and didn't really know about it until recently when I rebuilt a VM from VMWare version 4 to gain access to some features only available in 6.5 (multiple monitor support).
f0dder:
An alternative is to use VMWare which can build a virtual machine based on a physical installation.-Carol Haynes (September 15, 2009, 03:38 AM)
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It's a damn shame it's so hard (aka almost impossible) to go the other way, though - would be an extremely useful feature.
Carol Haynes:
How about Universal restore in Acronis True Image ? You should be able to restore a VM to physical hardware using that. Just use TI (with UR) in the VM and write the image to DVD or a spare partition and then use the recovery media to restore it to a physical drive.
registercleaner:
I think the best register cleaner is registry easy. They are very user friendly.
registercleaner:
Is PowetTools 2006 a good program? I never used it before. :tellme:
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