I was looking for a registry cleaner and there are just so many products out there from ‘Top Ten Review’ sites of dubious standing that I’m starting to suspect that some of them are scams.
Can anyone from our vaunted QT3 community point me towards a cheap/free registry cleaner of value?
Past threads like this recommended ccleaner. I tried it on that basis and didn’t have a problem with it, doing only a registry clean. Seems decent enough but it’s hard to measure whether it does what it needs well. I guess if you don’t have any new problems afterwards it’s done what it should.
Comodo (the firewall people) also make a CCleaner-like package. I didn’t like it as much a ccleaner - found it a bit too aggressive - but depending on your issue(s) is might be worth checking. Also free.
They don’t do anything useful and have the potential to cause more harm than good. Any registry entry modification should be fully understood, performed manually, and done with good reason.
My anecdotal evidence is that occasional use of CCleaner (w/registry clean) has left me with a 2008-era XP install that boots fast, works well and doesn’t crash despite constant installing and uninstalling of apps. This may be arbitrary and unrelated. I also ran it on the hopelessly crudded up office standalone machine and it seemed to make a significant difference.
As to reinstalling, why not try CCleaner and then reinstall if it doesn’t work? Sheesh, you reinstallation fetishists i don’t even
The few times I’ve used registry cleaners I’ve always reviewed the list of items to remove first and deselected anything that seemed might be problematic to have removed (or I was unsure about). Don’t just set it on automatic and let it rip. Backing up the registry and even having an undo file for the removed entries gives you more protection.
I agree, though, that unless your system is having obvious issues, there’s usually no reason to do it.
To support Equisilus even though I don’t use a reigistry cleaner, it really is extremely easy to backup and reload your registry should something go a bit awry. If you mess up your entire install, well … that’s another issue, but not doing anything stupid or automatic with CCleaner and the like ought to protect you from that.
You know how registry cleaners make your computer faster? They disable as much as they can from starting up automatically with windows. Guess what other easy-to-use tool does that: msconfig, included with Windows since 2000.
Every other feature of your garden variety registry cleaner is useless, or fixes a problem that occurs to one in a million installs and no your install is not that special.
The difference being that the cleaner can recommend items for you to disable. People who use msconfig without doing research wind up disabling stuff they don’t want to, or shouldn’t, disable.
“If you don’t recognise it, disable it. If you do recognise it, disable it if you want to” works perfectly fine. There are no essential windows components that register as a startup application. There are many essential Windows services, but that’s another story.
PS, there is another source of what startup items to disable: Google.
I like Solutoa lot for startup disabling specifically. It does a pretty good job of giving me hard numbers on how annoying my computer is getting with respect to startup, and gives me an easy way to shut off the crap that piles up.