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This “blog-entry” is also a continuing of the previous one (but a “direct” one, i.e. it’s part 2 of the same article); this time from “18. Registry related programs: part 1 (29.08.2006)” one: http://www.senserely.com/tayiper-18_registry_related_program… that I just posted …

This time, I will write about uselessness of these so-called “registry cleaners”. As first, I must note here on the beginning that two are actually two “major sorts” of registry cleaners. First, there are the ones that only clean (or should I rather say delete) any orphaned entries found during the registry-checking procedure; in other words, they are capable only of finding and then cleaning/deleting such orphaned entries. And as second, there are the others that beside finding these entries/values also search the hard-disk’s drives for corrections of such entries; these are mostly the paths stored as values (i.e. files and folders), paths in values of other similar entries, or names of the entries themselves if they contain path-references.

Then I will ask you to head over to “Ed Bott’s Windows Expertise » Why I don’t use registry cleaners”: http://www.edbott.com/weblog/archives/000643.html article posted on Ed Bott’s weblog (optionally see my own comments, which are signed as “Ivan Tadej”), however, I will state on the very beggining that there are few exceptions. For instance, I use the Registry First Aid program: http://www.RoseCitySoftware.com/Reg1Aid (or shortly “Reg 1 Aid”) from RoseCitySoftware that might be called a “registry cleaner”, but I rather call it a “registry maintainer”, since it doesn’t clean the registry automatically (like most of “registry cleaners” do, and what can even be quite dangerous), i.e. it offers users to browse invalid entries it finds, and then choose which ones to fix, and how to fix them; this was especially useful, when I changed the “ProgramFiles” and “CommonFiles” variables with MS’s TweakUI, because it simply fixed all that for me instead of doing it manually with Regedit that would be totally time-consuming.

Reg 1 Aid offers this options after completed scan:

“Fix entry” (to the suggested value or the one that you choose manually)
“Leave entry without change”
“Delete entry”
“Cut Invalid Substring” (for more complicated values; for instance values with more than one path)

You see, in general these various “orphaned” keys/entries/values surely make registry hive-files (and their respective backups) unnecessarily bigger, but the size of the registry-files itself certainly doesn’t degrade the computer’s performance per se, i.e. don’t impact the speed of registry operations (and therefore the overall computer’s speed) nomather how many of them were left after some program was un-installed, or how “deep” the respective key/entry/value resides in the registry structure, simply because the registry is demand-paged anyway, but also registry operations like queries (searching), reads and writes are not a linear process; for further info on this subject, also see my very own article on my home-site’s “articles.html” page: http://users.volja.net/tayiper/articles.html below under “THE REGISTRY-CLEANING SOFTWARE MYTH DEBUNKED” entry, and also check out a thread on Ars Technica forums titled “Keeping the registry tidy : How DO you do it ?!”: http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/ubb.x?a=tpc&s=500095… (my nick is “shirker”), and read there even more opinions about this type of programs.

P.S. - If I recall correctly (I will check it, and edit the article if necessary), the page on my home-site linked above, there are even more references to related forum-threads.

Take care, Ivan Tadej (user: “tayiper”)

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