I have tried all the reg cleaners but by farTHE best is Registry Shower by Arafasoft.I have been using it for 3 years with absolutely no problems.Using Unible registry booster 2010 found 20 errors,Registry Shower found 400! It searches really deep and takes a while but worth itand has never caused problems ever!
update! i just downloaded and used ccleaner. Edit: i used this program first then used wise registry cleaner and it still found a whole lot more! so i was wondering why wise reg cleaner is more in depth than ccleaner?
That is excellent advice, as no noticeable different will result with registry cleaner, and the chance of causing problems is great. Having said that, ccleaner is a safe one, for a novice.
Windows is a closed source system. Developers of registry cleaners do not have the core code of Windows 7 and are not working on definitive information, but rather they are going on past knowledge and experience. Automatic cleaners will usually have to do some guesswork. Modifying registry keys incorrectly can cause Windows instability, or make Windows unbootable. No registry cleaner is completely safe and the potential is ever present to cause more problems than they claim to fix. Registry cleaners cannot distinguish between good and bad. If you run a registry cleaner, it will delete all those keys which are obsolete and sitting idle; but in reality, those keys may well be needed by some programs or windows at a later time. Windows 7 is much more efficient at managing the registry than previous Windows versions. Even if you use the CCleaner registry to delete keys left over when uninstalling programs, these few keys will not make 1 millisecond's difference in performance. If you run CCleaner or any other registry cleaner and do not know precisely what you are doing, you will have problems down the road. There are no gains to be had from using a registry cleaner and the risk is great.
This gets my vote. I do think CCleaner is benign enough to use but then why use it? I do use CCleaner to zap the other junk, however. There were some fee based offerings mentioned here that I wouldn't mind trying just before a reinstall to maybe get more mileage from an old system but I just can't force myself to pay for a registry cleaner.
None. Comon guys the registry has thousands of entries, do you think deleting a dozen here or there will make a difference? Has anybody noticed a performance boost after "cleaning" the registry? Remember many a grief has been caused by the registry cleaner eloping with valid entries. So my reco- use CCleaner if and only if you get a startup error box about missing dlls or some other obvious registry error like that, not as a matter of routine.
Hi all, this is my first post here, but i have tested(out of curiosity) A LOT of the registry cleaning and "all in one" system utilities... in the last 5-6 years First of all.. my PC(windows xp) is well maintained so there could be no BIG difference with ANY of the cleaners, but.. Advanced SystemCare Pro .. makes some little difference in PC responsiveness , but you dont get to see what it removes !?!? jv16 PowerTools ... it tells you that it increased your pc performance/health from eg.90% to 100%, but nothing noticeable, its "uninstaler for software leftovers..." finds old uninstalled software remains, but doesent clean them good-enough, may produce some new errors(it did for me) Registry First Aid , makes nice backups before cleaning, and separates the findings as safe, for advanced users.. etc, finds long ago deleted file paths.. Wise registry cleaner.. finds a lot of registry "errors" that are not really errors, but it doesn't hurt the (my)system. CCleaner.. its more a disc cleaner than registry cleaner, it finds only SOME of the really safe-to-remove reg.strings. TuneUp Utilities .. no performance gain from reg cleaning(its safe), but its a good system tweaker/optimizer uniblue SpeedUpMyPC .. not much to tell, i dont like it for no real reason (it doesent "SpeedUpMyPC") winutilities pro.. nothing extraordinary, no harm done to my PC.. Ashampoo WinOptimizer similar to tuneup utilities, but lighter on resources and better gui interface(for me). comodo system cleaner.. maybe too aggressive cleaner, but i think it does speedup boot time.. advanced system optimizer.... i tested it long ago, i dont remember the results well, but i remember that i liked it... And the biggest speed increase... always came from defragmenting the drive(and registry) p.s. all of the commercial software i tested i got it for free from some giveaways "here and there" on the net, and i ALWAYS have some recent system image backup.
Anybody knows a registry repair tool that can fix user permissions especially for usual branches, like currentcontrolset ets., I'm afraid my registry got corrupted during the time so now some services fail to start, or some devices fail to install. I suspect that this is a growing registry corruption, coming from scratch BiE's DVD, which still more I thing is not proper. Now only I have two choices, repair the registry, or clean reinstall with original DVD. Having closer look on the 'problem' hives, they have assigned no access rights, and no owner, and even I can't change owner. I guess this is some corruption inside registry permissions, any tool could check these keys, and try to repair/reassign owner/reassign default access rights?
At the risk of sounding unconstructive to this discussion, but: the only reasonable tools are either low-level or normal registry backup/restore tools. Everything else has a high risk of breaking more than repairing anything, any Microsoft professional will confirm this to you. The best way of not breaking anything is to install as few apps as possible, as many as necessary and then work. I admit this isn't an approach that works well with videogame players and "I'll try this tool out and that one as well" - but for games I recommend backups and for that other thing use a virtualization tool like VMware to try out new software, anything else will mess things up for you sooner or later. Please keep in mind that this is in no way meant as a condescending statement, but sincerely my experience in the field. (Although my 20 years of working with PCs and other architectures doesn't necessarily guarantee a great amount of acquired useful knowledge and experience, but that's my experience so far that I stand by.)
Just go into HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE and HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software remember the Wow6432Node in x64 and delete what you know you don't have currently installed. When you do that Ccleaner will find the rest for you. Whatever you're unsure about just leave alone.
I've been using CCleaner ever since WinXP SP1 came out. I tried other registry cleaner, but I found out some registry cleaner were cheating! (eg: Registry Mechanics: it alter some regvalue to speedup some settings... arrgh!)
I have to agree with kubato. I have lost count of the systems I've installed and used Registry First Aid (from Rose City Software), and I have not had a problem, ever, with any of them. It's one of the first apps that I run on slow systems that I work on. Another promising looking one is AVG PC TuneUp 2011. It is not just for registry errors and I have begun to use it along with Registry First Aid routinely.