Is registry cleaning needed for a stable PC?

windude99 said:

F5ing said:

windude99 said:

This what?

Thumbs up more than likely.

Oh. Thanks

lol.. it's sort of a "young guys" lingo on the messages boards. It means what you posted rings true.. and they are in total agreement with you.

This gets asked a lot, yet there's always conflicting answers and misinformation posted. So, let me try and clear it up for you going by tried and true experience.

CCleaner is about the only trusted, safe cleaner out there. By default, it doesn't dig deep enough to do any damage. It is safe to use. However, given your question, I liken it to BIOS-flashing. You don't do it just to do it. You do it to solve an issue. CCleaner has helped me MANY times over solve issues, but I don't run it on my systems just because I feel like it. If you need to use a reg cleaner, that's the one to use. If your system is working perfectly fine right now, then there's no reason to run one. CCleaner has other useful parts as well, so it always gets installed for me. But the reg cleaner is there to help me solve issues, or clean up after app uninstalls. it is not part of my regular, routine maintenance.

Agree with most of what was just posted by DeaconFrost and pparks1.

If you use CCleaner to clean out the registry you can always create a restore point beforehand, use CCleaner's option to create a backup, and you still have the opportunity to view the list of keys it identified and choose which keys you want to delete.

pparks1 said:

188 entries in a registry with problems, out of hundreds of thousands of entries from a performance standpoint isn't likely going to amount to anything tangible.

And if the registry really was a part of the problem someone was having, it would likely be related to only one or a few of those 188 keys. The rest of the bunch are more than likely benign/ignored anyway, any performance improvements by deleting them would likely be unmeasurable.

Someone once said that the registry is like a huge parking structure, the size of Texas, and sweeping out a space here and the there doesn't amount to jack squat.