I might as well put my two cents in.
As someone who does BSOD's, I see the results of registry cleaning first hand.
Any reg cleaner makes assumptions for you and you will never know what they are.
Any possible small gains is far out weighed by the potential risk.
I would give you one piece of advice. If you are going to use one, make sure you do a full backup because you may just need it.
I have ERUNT installed on my Windows 7 machine machine and it works fine and as far as I'm concerned, just to tell some of you, its not actually a Registry cleaner. Its a program that backs up the Registry for you which I believe is a more potent method than the manual Registry backup. Plus it also has tool that I believe defragments or compresses the Registry a bit and yes that is the NTREGOPT. I have used it a few times and the one that came with my version of Erunt works on Windows 7. Many of you simply thought that ERUNT is a registry cleaner but its NOT. Its a Registry backup tool for heaven's sake.
Compared to many others on this forum, I am not totally against the use of Registry cleaners. This has been a repeating subject of debate really. But in my view since I'm used to computers running like 1GB or less amount of RAM (people with 4GBs or more RAM don't argue with me on this), I have observed these machines behave poorly over time or have other issues even if you do the recommended tweaking tips like disk cleanup, diable eyecandy, disk defrag. Registry cleaners did help in some of these problems but they are not meant to be used by inexperienced users. Some power users will find them handy at times such removing obsolete entries by removed apps or by the removing the effects of some malware. I use an app called Revo uninstaller to remove apps more cleanly so they leave behind the lesser junk on the Registry or whatever. I'm just trying to justify not a one-sided sentiment here with regards to the use of Regitry cleaners.
I find ERUNT a great tool to some people before they use registry cleaners or those who will try to negate the effects of malware. I havent visited their site for a long time and I'm not aware if they released any versions that are meant for Windows 7. My ERUNT version was made for XP but anyway, its still works on Windows 7 anyway.
No, Vertex, we did not. This is the original post:
We were talking about whatever unknown named backup and optimizer Frank was refering to. Does it matter which?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Deal, I won't agrue. But is the risk really worth the tiny benefit, rather than just upgrading at least 1 GB more of RAM, as the very LEAST recommended RAM is 1 GB to run Win7?
I do too as of late, this is not a bad idea. Should exercise caution with this program, however, and would probably not recommend it to novices. Control Panel>Uninstall programs is perfectly fine for them, and the performance lost from it is minimal at best.
@Dustsailor
Yes, I would not recommend Revo for novices but its a such a nice program for power users. There were times I used a "light" registry cleaner which was CCleaner and it did get rid off some annoying instances which is more than a "tiny" benefit.
I'm not too happy with the Add/Remove programs feature on the Control Panel. There are apps out there that don't tidy themselves up when uninstalled and their obsolete componenents may still linger around if not removed well. Usually, big programs like MS Office leave a lot of unwanted junk when uninstalled.
The times that I have used a registry cleaner, I used Cleaner as it doesn't seem to aggressive. Ad a example, I just now used Cleaner to run a registry scan and I found no problems. I then ran Clary Utilities and it found 109 " uninsured"entries which tells me that it is too aggressive and I would never use it. If I deiced to clean the registry, and at this point I probably won't. But if I do I will not use Clary utilities. After reading all of this it has given me a lot to think about, but I'm going to proceed on the line of caution.I may leave the registry alone wth few exceptions. Thanks for all the feed back.
"
Good idea Frank - judicious use of CCleaner seems to be the only one recommended consistently. If I was ever to use it, I would seek advice here first.
Regards,
Golden
Yes, Frank. Better not use Glary, its not Clary by the way. Its Glary Utilities.
CCleaner is the safest Registry cleaner I know but its not 100% safe. Microsoft did have its own online Registry cleaner which was on the Windows Live OneCare Safety Scanner which they discontinued and replaced with Microsoft Safety Scanner which is not a good thing because it had lesser tools and has little point if Microsoft already has MSE as their antivirus. It was sad they replaced it with something less.
I agree with what most of you are saying about not cleaning or even optimizing the registry. So, I'm going to stop cleaning and optimizing. But, it's seems that over time the registry can have so many unneeded entries and can be so fragmented that it's hard to understand that it will even work as well as it does. It would be nice if when un-installing a program, the un-installer would remove all the entries that were put in when the program was originally installed.
Frank1
As a Revo user I often use it install with. It keeps a file of the additions and then when you uninstall with that file it is supposed to get everything that was added. Alas I don't really have any way to confirm how thorough it is.
Quote