Registry Cleaners

The best registry cleaner, in my opinion, is no registry cleaner and an ssd

Hi all,

I might as well make my first post on here about what can be a contentious issue.

I have just finished building my first computer running Windows 7, prior to that I have only ever used XP, apart from various Linux distributions inside a VM.

When I first started with computers I came across the question of whether or not to use registry cleaners and after much reading I decided to give it a try making sure that before I removed a single key the registry was backed up with Erunt and I made another backup with the cleaning software.
With each program I used after a few days I usually had a short list of excluded keys, since then the only backups I have made have been with Erunt on a daily basis, I have never had a problem from running a registry cleaner.

I am following the same practice with Windows 7 and the only difference so far is that I have not had to exclude anything in any of the programs I have used, they are: CCleaner - Glary Utilities Pro - jv16 PowerTools 2011 - TUU 2007 (I have licenses for every version through to 2011 and still prefer 2007) - Wise Registry Cleaner v6 (Tried v7 once and went back to v6).
When I get around to buying a license for it there will be one more, Registry First Aid. (My present copy is x86 only.)

Why so many?
Because in my experience they do not all find the same things, there are also differences in other parts of the 3 utility programs.

Would I recommend the use of a registry cleaner to others?
Only with a very clear warning to always make a backup first.

If I was limited to one program which would it be?
If it was a utility program it would be jv16, if it was a registry only program it would be RFA.

Where RFA is concerned there are two other reasons why I would recommend it, it has a very good registry defrag tool (in the last few months since my old PC died I have been using a Netbook and after about a month of full-time use it gets noticeably slower, defragging the registry sorts it out).
But the main reason is its ability to 'edit' registry keys and not simply remove them.
A couple of years ago I moved several GB of programs and files from the system partition on my old PC to a non-system partition. RFA picked up the new locations and edited the keys, I never had to reinstall anything and I never had any problems.

Putting any software on a computer you should have at least a basic idea of what it can do, the thing about registry cleaners is that if they do cause problems they can be worse problems than most other types of software cause.

Welcome Pilgrim to the Seven Forums. Your first post here is most welcome and refreshing.

And it was a treat to read the System Specs that you have filled.

Amarnath Wanchoo

Thank you both for the welcome.

gregrocker,

My experience so far is that 7 is more 'tidy' than XP in terms of unwanted files/registry keys etc.
More tidy but not completely so.

Since my previous post I installed the trial version of RFA and ran a scan, it found 509 keys that it considers unnecessary, having looked through the first 100 or so I did not disagree with it.
Having said that the first time I ran it on my XP systems it found over 1000 items on each of them, all of which I removed without any problems arising.

While I agree with your point about people being duped into buying this (or any other) type of software it is not something I have ever done, all of the software I mentioned above is either free (CCleaner, Wise) or came from giveaways so it never cost me a cent, the same is true of 99% or thereabouts of all the software I use.
If I do buy a license for RFA it will be more for its editing abilities than anything else, something which has served me well in the past, unfortunately to my knowledge they have only ever given away the x86 version which until now was all I ever needed.

No one is saying that Windows 7 is not a great OS. So great that it doesn't have a single error in Registry when it is installed on a clean drive.

But that doesn't mean that as we keep installing third party programs and keep uninstalling them every now and again, a number of errors and orphans are not left behind in the Registry. Because erroneous entries are generated in the Registry with continual use.

I also concede that my Registry has over a million keys plus values. If jvPowerTools is able to locate a little over 600 erroneous entries it is not such a big deal. Only 0.06% or nearly negligible errors. But there are some who strive for perfection although they might not always achieve it. I think they should be left alone and their effort should be lauded.

ignatzatsonic said:

Try this test:

Install Windows 7 on a clean drive.

Install nothing else.

Then install RFA or some other cleaner and see how many unnecessary keys it finds on this virgin Windows install.

Then ponder the results.