Registry Cleaners - Do these things really work? — OZONE Asylum, home of the Mad Scientists

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Registry Cleaners - Do these things really work?

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Your Text: Insert Slimies » Insert UBB Code » Close Last Tag \| All Tags UBB Help	[quote][b]White Hawk said:[/b] Defragmentation is generally the only maintenance task your registry will require, and even then only if you're in the habit of installing and uninstalling applications repeatedly.[/quote] Generally you're right. However, programs can set settings in the registry that can cause problems entirely unrelated to that program's operation. An example would be that a few of my games, including Deus Ex 2 and WoW, for a time stopped working because a plug-in to Skype that I was testing out overrode the default Windows registry keys for audio devices. Uninstalling it didn't help since there was nothing resetting the keys to their original value. [quote] The rest of it is generally bollocks - registry cleaners cause problems; their requirement is a myth perpetuated by companies that are trying to sell you their utilities, and then they generally tend to remove a lot of useful entries with the so-called junk entries.[/quote]Quite true. The problem mostly lies in that one person's useful application is another person's nuisance however. If using a registry cleaner you need to make sure to set it's settings such that it doesn't clean out things you consider useful but the author consider nuisances or privacy problems. One such example is that they often clean out the history of the "Run..." item on the start menu - and I use this history quite a lot, so I wouldn't want them to empty it.[quote]Adding keys to block trojans?? That's a new one - anti-spyware utilities will do this without trashing the registry in the process.[/quote]Actually, most often the anti-spyware and the registry cleaners do this in the same way. Most spyware and trojans check for certain registry keys before installing themselves. These anti-spyware and registry cleaners usually insert these keys with dummy values such that they think there is already an instance of them installed, so they don't install blank installs over installs that have already started collected data. Thereby preventing them from installing in the first place. (Anti-spyware has other ways of preventing spyware and malware as well that don't include registry hacks such as these, but this is a mechanism that both types of programs share.)[quote]System defrag has nothing to do with the registry - but if you wish to manually maintain the registry in this manner anyway, I believe there is a Microsoft registry defragmentation utility that you can download.[/quote] Actually it does. A system defrag obviously defrags system parts protected from a normal defrag that are not part of the registry, but if you use SysInternals PageDefrag you'll see the brunt of the fragmentation it deals with is in registry files, simply because the registry sees many more small changes than most other parts of the system. (SysInternals is Microsoft owned nowadays by the way, and their PageDefrag is a Microsoft recommended utility for manual registry defragmentation.) [quote]As for 'useless keys' - these are really not an issue, and certainly do not cause BSoDs...[/quote]No, but they add to the startup time and the time required for applications accessing the registry. Mostly harmless, however.[quote]I maintain, with conviction, that if two identical machines used in precisely the same manner for a prolonged period of time were differentiated only by the regular use of a registry cleaner on one machine, there would be no performance improvement in the cleaned machine[/quote]That depends on which applications are installed and how well secured the other parts of the system is, of course. If you're talking about virus riddled public computers in an internet café, I'd say running registry cleaners often on one machine and not on the next machine will prove the former machine to end up in much better shape than the latter. With proper anti-malware, anti-spyware, anti-virus; a good firewall; and in multi-user systems limited user permissions; a lot of the after-work done by registry cleaners is made unnecessary however.[quote] - in fact, you'd likely see an increase in errors and issues, and even security holes as a direct result of the cleaner. Registry cleaners just don't do anything useful, and are often the cause of serious issues.[/quote]Security holes - well, at least CrapCleaner has a very good history of patching holes they introduce. They can and do introduce other problems such as some programs not starting up at all after doing cleaning, or programs malfunctioning due to them changing required registry entries. That being said: I find registry cleaners are not at all as useful as other system maintainance tools. Defragmenters, memory checking tools, graphics card and network card diagnosis tools, process viewers, event log analysers, anti-malware and anti-spyware etc. And of course, making sure you keep drivers up to date. -- var Liorean = { abode: "[sigrotate][url]http://liorean.web-graphics.com/[/url]\|[url]http://codingforums.com/[/url]\|[url]http://web-graphics.com/[/url][/sigrotate]", profile: "[url]http://codingforums.com/member.php?u=5798[/url]"}; [small](Edited by [url=http://www.ozoneasylum.com/user/5032]liorean[/url] on 02-22-2008 01:32)[/small] Loading...
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