Whats a good registry cleaner?

[travistee]

Whats a good registry cleaner?

Any recommendations?

[kc8adu]

Re: Whats a good registry cleaner?

ccleaner.
otherwise known as crap cleaner.

[Harvey]

Re: Whats a good registry cleaner?

Format. Works every time.

Seriously, I've seen more PCs fucked up by so called Registry Cleaners than I have by Virii/Trojans that I would strongly suggest you avoid them unless you absolutely know you need it, and even then make sure you take a backup of the registry before you think of running one.

Otherwise, you'll be back to my first suggestion unwittingly.

[willawake]

Re: Whats a good registry cleaner?

i agree. one friend uses cyberscrub and has some wierd problems occasionally.

defrag is something often omitted and which will solve some performance probs

cant beat a reinstall though and opportunity to install only the progs which you ended up using and omit all the ones you didnt like.

[acstech]

Re: Whats a good registry cleaner?

Defrag, clean out the crap (viruses, toolbars, anything from symantec, etc), and add memory. Works great in most cases. Probably 90% of the Dell's out there have insufficient memory. With memory prices as cheap as they are, it doesn't make sense not to upgrade.

I too have seen registry cleaners cause problems. Avoid them.

[momaka]

Re: Whats a good registry cleaner?

CCleaner is a good general cleaner (temporary internet files, temporary files, history, etc.). But like everyone else here, I wouldn't recommend you run a registry cleaner... unless you plan to carefully look at every registry item the cleaner says is trash (and some just won't be).

By the way, why do you need a reg cleaner? Is your computer slower than before? If so, there are many other better ways to clean it up and make it work faster, some already mentioned above.

[Toasty]

Re: Whats a good registry cleaner?

TuneUp Utilities 200x and jv16 Powertools

I use TUU for day to day cleaning and optimizing, and jv16 for heavy duty purging.

Never have found it necessary to reformat any '98 or XP installation. :|

Been using them on mine and customers systems for many years. Reliable & safe as they both make backups of what they do.

http://www.tune-up.com/

http://www.macecraft.com/

[NxB]

Re: Whats a good registry cleaner?

CC cleaner ftw.

>>Never have found it necessary to reformat any '98 or XP installation.

Via 5in1 drivers.

[JohnBiggs]

Re: Whats a good registry cleaner?

Linux

[willawake]

Re: Whats a good registry cleaner?

angle grinder

[momaka]

Re: Whats a good registry cleaner?

TuneUp Utilities 200x

I like the registry defrag tool in that one. I used to run it every once in a while on one of my computers and it always claimed that it freed-up 1-5MB of registry after defragmenting. There wasn't any noticable change in system performance, however... except maybe for shutdown time.

[i4004]

Re: Whats a good registry cleaner?

cccleaner is crap(not crap cleaner, but crap).
why?
well why would i want to clean things that are part of my day-to-day usage?
those cc lists here
http://www.ccleaner.com/
it's essentailly cleans cache of all browsers, which means i would have to enter every forum's login/pass, and bunch of other things i just don't wanan enter anytime some program thinks it's important....talking about shooting myself in the foot...

as for registry, it doesn't realyl have to be cleaned at all.
unused entries are exactly that; unused.
they're not loading the system...

if system is slow use task manager to see what's slowing it down, though, yeah, sometimes infections get so bad it's easier just to install everything anew...

and i don't think defrag speeds up the system to any measureable degree...i mean the fragmentation of my drives is just silly and i have no intention of doing anything about it....it's silly to the point that burning programs are acting funny when they ask hdd to buffer stuff, but performance hit? no, i don't see it...and dvds are being burnt fine, so...

sometimes it's just the filesystem corruption, so you should do chkdsk from time to time...yeasterday i had a problem where winrar wouldn't work properly(it stalls and then says he can't find the path), did chkdsk and it's fine again...
offcourse, you don't have to use commandline, use it via right lick on drive,properties and then tools...

[travistee]

Re: Whats a good registry cleaner?

This is why I think I need one.

I had an ASUS mobo that I upgraded.
I had a P5P800SE and now I have a P6T with an I7.
I'm doing a repair install of XP using the disk I had with the original mobo.
There are some ASUS utilities on there that will not completely uninstall.
If I want to install the new ASUS utilities they will have conflicts with things that the old utilities left behind when uninstalled ( ASUS says).
So, I need to cleanup the leftovers that are going to mess up the new ASUS utilities.

[momaka]

Re: Whats a good registry cleaner?

cccleaner is crap(not crap cleaner, but crap).
why?
well why would i want to clean things that are part of my day-to-day usage?
those cc lists here
http://www.ccleaner.com/
it's essentailly cleans cache of all browsers, which means i would have to enter every forum's login/pass, and bunch of other things i just don't wanan enter anytime some program thinks it's important

Login/pass is stored in cookies when you check the "remember me" or "keep me signed in" box, and you can tell CCleaner which cookies to leave and which to clean up.

I agree with what you said about background tasks running and slowing the system down. That's probably the #1 cause for system slowdowns actually.
My friend's laptop had 80-something processes, no wonder it took 20 minutes to boot. I know you can use MSConfig to disable processes, but it's much simpler in CCleaner.
I also use CCleaner for daily cleanup of Temp Internet Files, which tend to take up a lot of space if you don't clean them up regularly. I've set a space limit on my Temp Internet Files folder as well.
And I never use History, so that gets deleted without a question.

Try to do all of that manually, and it will take much longer.

[Toasty]

Re: Whats a good registry cleaner?

>>There are some ASUS utilities on there that will not completely uninstall.<<

Why? Do they say that they didn't completely uninstall or that the uninstall failed?

-Start
-Run
-regedit
-click on "My Computer" in registry tree
-press Ctrl+F
-type asus in the "Find what:" box
-make sure all 3 boxes are checked "Keys/Values/Data"
-click "Find Next" button
-Backup/Export each key it finds (Google it if you don't know how)
-delete keys that report Asus in string

That should purge the Asus out of the registry.

[Toasty]

Re: Whats a good registry cleaner?

>>Temp Internet Files, which tend to take up a lot of space if you don't clean them up regularly. <<

???

A 100 Mb Temp File on a 200Gb drive is.....?

1/2000th or .05%

or $1 in every $2,000

[NxB]

Re: Whats a good registry cleaner?

Yea, I don't use the IE cleanup functions of CC cleaner.
Unused registry entries are no good. If you recall on Win2k or 98 the system wouldn't boot if the hive got too big. Defragging the registry is probably stupid like defragging the ram. Just people trying to make a buck selling pointless software to morons.

As for HD defragging I did it a few times and it didn't help much. All of that data moving probably just puts extra wear on your HD. Defragging 500 or 1tb drives? You will probably waste more time running the program then the fragmentation wastes.

[acstech]

Re: Whats a good registry cleaner?

I've seen HD defragging help old used Dell machines quite a bit. It's all a function of how bad it was before. Machines that have been in use for 5 years without having been defragged will benefit. But it doesn't need to be done very often. Worst case once a year, depending on usage.

[Toasty]

Re: Whats a good registry cleaner?

For HD defrag I use Raxco's Perfect Disk. I set it to run if necessary (you set frag level), and only when in screen saver.

It will also do a boot time defrag and move the swapfile if needed to make it contiguous.

NxB>>Just people trying to make a buck selling pointless software to morons.<<

Agree, but not all of them are morons. It's scare tactics into the "sky is falling" scenario. Like cookies, the bane of all that is Internet. ROFLMAO

[momaka]

Re: Whats a good registry cleaner?

A 100 Mb Temp File on a 200Gb drive is.....?
1/2000th or .05%

More like 200MB after a week regular surfing. Watch youtube, and it can grow to 300MB+.
...
Ok, this computer has a 80GB hard drive, so like you said, even 500MB wouldn't matter. But I have an older computer with a 20GB HD, where the drive is split in C: \ and D: \, with C: \ being only 3.5GB. Do some surfing, use photoshop a bit and watch XP display low HD space messages. I've gone as low as 20MB of free space left quite a few times.

Maybe there's no point for most of you to run CCleaner, but I need to on my older systems. Besides, it usually takes around 10 seconds to clean up, so I don't really mind running it even daily before shutdown.

I've seen HD defragging help old used Dell machines quite a bit. It's all a function of how bad it was before. Machines that have been in use for 5 years without having been defragged will benefit. But it doesn't need to be done very often. Worst case once a year, depending on usage.

Defenitely. It also helps if you've used an HD almost entirely.