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#11
Bill is spot on. Unlike XP, Windows does a fine job of maintaining the registry. Use Ccleaner; but don't mess with the registry.englandjeff,
If you have had a bad experience with the registry clean component of ccleaner, just ignore it. The file cleaner and registry cleaner are 2 separate features of CCleaner. In fact, at the risk of being lambasted by some users, let me say that registry cleaning is a highly overrated feature UNLESS you're getting registry errors. E.g. after uninstalling an app, you may find an annoying popup at startup saying so and so dll missing or so and so could not be found. But that happens because of incomplete uninstallation which leaves behind orphan entries in the registry and phantom startups. In such situations, i do find the registry cleaner of CCleaner most useful. But running that feature as a routine thing doesnt really help IMO because the registry is so huge that a few dozen entries here or there doesnt really give you any performance boost or whatever its supposed to do.
Bad experiences like yours may happen because some required registry key was accidentally deleted. So go ahead and just use the regular file cleaner in CCleaner. Let me again say, CCleaner has a long list of options in which you can choose what type of files you want to delete and which ones to exclude from cleaning. Start conservatively, then gradually explore more options.
Another thing i'd just like to mention, why are we all so obsessed with cleaning and squeezing out every last drop of hard disk space? All of us have huge hard drives these days and if a small fraction is actually taken up by temp/dump files, we go into a tizzy. But we dont think for a moment before installing massive apps that take gbs and gbs.
Sorry for the long post.
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