My post was and is never aimed at any particular person(s) posts, just the way these semi-weekly threads on Reg Cleaners seem to snowball against reg cleaners while often failing to distinguish the scam and lesser apps from the one true genius app.
there is no perfect registry cleaner but some are better than most.
Stay away from the following, or there be bad things happenin! arhh!
RegInOut recommended by Intel (ahahhahahahaahaha) really?
Registry Mechanic so bad.
Auslogics oh dear what a crap set of tools.
TuneUp Utilities just no.
ReCure bloated gui and finds lots of junk keys but can mess it all up.
Chily Registry Optimizer and Cleaner (beware of people who use ebay style letting in the gui, that alone should scare you away!)
Oleclean very old, do not use on anything newer than xp, unless you want to reinstall everything.
Registry Wizard may look pretty but it's junk.
Jv16 used to be good but now its tacky looking and therefore a smear on my shoe that smells.
Safe to use; providing you look at what you are deleting!!!!!
ccleaner and the registry cleaner from win 7 manager, has loads of junk apps with it but the cleaner is good, no problems with it. (just watch what you delete from ActiveX and COM & Invalid Patch, because they contain the most entries) I always leave the ones that don't have a visible path name to something on the hdd.
Nice list except I'd distinguish Auslogics Defraggers, which are the state-of-the-art, from their set of optimization tools Boostspeed which they sell in order to make the defraggers free.
Boostspeed had useful apps for Vista and XP, but Win7 beta testers watched every optimization tweak became unnecessary as Win7 was pared down and optimized perfectly. Tweaking Win7 today will almost always come back to bite you - it only needs normal system settings variations.
I've been using ccleaner and auslogics defrag for years now (on xp sp3), but for the past year I noticed a problem with Warhammer Online which kept re-patching the same content, and I became convinced it was to do with ccleaner.
On my new pc, Win 7 Home Prem, 64 bit, Warhammer was running fine until I ran ccleaner and although it hasn't forced a repatch yet, the log-in character animations are frozen which was always a sign that the repatch was on its way. (Animations weren't frozen prior to using ccleaner). I have restored reg files, but it hasn't helped.
Further, I had downloaded and successfully used several Windows 7 themes using the VistaGlazz patcher. After using ccleaner, the themes no longer worked. I restored backed up reg files, deleted the themes, reinstalled them and all is now working fine.
From extensive reading of threads dedicated to this topic over the past few days, the opinion seems to be split 50/50. For those who argue that they have installed ccleaner on hundreds/thousands of pc's without any known problems I would ask whether you can be sure that all those customers would recognise whether a problem had occurred with the registry? In other words, there people may have been having strange problems which they did not have the expertise to connect to ccleaner? (I don't know this, of course, I'm just wondering).
Since the problem with Warhammer (which has been extensively researched by a customer services rep, checking patch files etc and he can find no problem in the patch itself), and the latest problem (again with Warhammer and also with themes), I have lost faith in ccleaner. I do realise that my own lack of in-depth knowledge about the registry caused me to allow ccleaner to remove suggested problems, but I did check through them every time and they were all fragments left behind by uninstallers etc.
At this point I feel too nervous to clean the registry, but was wondering if an occasional reg defrag might be beneficial without being too aggressive?
Take my advice, as I have Ccleaner. It is a valued part of my tune up. Just uncheck the registry components and use Ccleaner on a regular basis to keep your hard drive clean.
I was thinking of doing that very thing, Rich, thanks. Will wait for a few more suggestions before deciding whether to try an occasional defrag of registry (I already defrag hard drive fairly regularly with Auslogics free). Please could people also recommend a particular reg defragger, with reasons, if possible.
Thanks.
This has been suggested many times a the forum for speed and results
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