Registry Utilities

**badprimer1** · 11-13-09, 03:59 PM

Does anyone have any experience with registry utilities? If so, is there one you recommend? I often read that cleaning and fixing the registry will help with performance. I also read from some that say never use the registry utilities. I have one that came pre-package with Norton - Norton Utilties. It did a scan and found 100's of issues and flag some as crucial. My computer is working ok, could be better, but don't want to screw it up.

**Kanati** · 11-13-09, 04:51 PM

Windows loads the entire registry into memory when it loads... So if you are running low on memory, sometimes cleaning might be beneficial. But usually those registry programs just clean out orphaned entries that no longer have a program associated with them. So they aren't doing anything to hurt you except eat a bit of memory. Anti spyware and antivirus programs will take care of the really harmful entries like the "runonce" and on start entries so... Meh... I've run them before. I've never seen them give any kind of performance increase nor do I expect that they will now. And back in the early days (95,98,etc) I remember some horror stories of trashed operating systems. But these days I doubt they'll do that as long as you aren't running a shady program to begin with.

Up to you... But I doubt it'll do much for you. But it shouldn't mess up your system either.

**WileECyte** · 11-13-09, 05:03 PM

I use CCleaner. It's worked well for me in 2000, XP, Vista & now Windows 7. The disk space cleanup it does is also very helpful. I like a nice clean system, and CCleaner helps keep my disk and registry nice and sparkly clean.

**Phyrelight** · 11-13-09, 05:46 PM

I also use CCleaner. Decent app.

**Viktor_Olin** · 11-13-09, 06:27 PM

CCleaner's a very good app. Be certain to back up your registry prior to any registry cleaning (there's a setting in CCleaner to remind you to do so). Never use a registry cleaner that doesn't offer to back up the registry before cleaning.

In my experience, registry cleaning has never had a noticeable effect on performance.

**WileECyte** · 11-13-09, 11:29 PM

Never impacted performance, but it's fixed things for me a number of times when apps leave registry crap around after uninstalling. There were a few obscure apps that had issues when I tried reinstalling... until I cleaned out the dead registry keys, the software refused to install. For all intents and purposes, the software thought it was already installed.