Registry Program?

Bruce Chambers wrote:



The only thing needed to safely clean your registry is knowledge
and Regedit.exe. If you lack the knowledge and experience to maintain
your registry by yourself, then you also lack the knowledge and
experience to safely configure and use any automated registry cleaner,
no matter how safe they claim to be.

Further, no one has ever demonstrated, to my satisfaction, that the
use of an automated registry cleaner, particularly by an untrained,
inexperienced computer user, does any real good. There's certainly been
no empirical evidence offered to demonstrate that the use of such
products to "clean" WinXP's registry improves a computer's performance
or stability.

What specific problem are you experiencing that you *know* beyond
all reasonable doubt will be fixed by using an automated registry
cleaner? If you do have a problem that is rooted in the registry, it
would be far better to simply edit (after backing up, of course) only
the specific key(s) and/or value(s) that are causing the problem. Why
use a shotgun when a scalpel will do the job? Additionally, the
manually changing of one or two registry entries is far less likely to
have the dire consequences of allowing an automated product to make
multiple changes simultaneously.

I always use Regedit.exe. I trust my own experience and judgment
far more than I would any automated registry cleaner. I strongly
encourage others to acquire the knowledge, as well.

Hi Bruce.

While I agree that Registry Cleaners need to be used with caution
there are circumstances where their use is warranted because manual
cleaning with RegEdit would be excessively cumbersome and time
consuming.

For example, have you ever tried cleaning up the leftover crud and
corruption after uninstalling a really shoddily programmed
application? For an illustration of this try installing Norton
Antivirus 2003 or SystemWorks 2003, get it up to date and use it for a
couple of days then uninstall it. Afterwords try cleaning up the
residue with Regedit. It will take a while. It is so bad that
Symantec has released a special utility just for this purpose
(RNAV2003.EXE).

Another instance from my own experience. A couple of years ago I had
a second hard drive installed in my computer, and I installed Visual
Studio dot Net onto this drive. A few months later the drive died and
I was not in a position to replace it at that time. And I could not
run the uninstall for VS.NET because the files were no longer present
and I did not have the spare disk space to install it again on another
partition. In order to clean up my system and get all of the file
associations etc. sorted out I ended up using a registry cleaner. It
removed something like 15,000 entries related to VS.NET from the
registry. Needless to say doing that manually would have been quite a
daunting task.


Ron Martell Duncan B.C. Canada
--
Microsoft MVP
On-Line Help Computer Service
http://onlinehelp.bc.ca

"The reason computer chips are so small is computers don't eat much."

Ron Martell wrote:



Hi Bruce.

While I agree that Registry Cleaners need to be used with caution
there are circumstances where their use is warranted because manual
cleaning with RegEdit would be excessively cumbersome and time
consuming.

For example, have you ever tried cleaning up the leftover crud and
corruption after uninstalling a really shoddily programmed
application? For an illustration of this try installing Norton
Antivirus 2003 or SystemWorks 2003, get it up to date and use it for a
couple of days then uninstall it. Afterwords try cleaning up the
residue with Regedit. It will take a while. It is so bad that
Symantec has released a special utility just for this purpose
(RNAV2003.EXE).


Actually, I have had to manually clean up behind Symantec quite a few
times. Using Regedit's Find capability, I don't recall it's ever taking
more than 5 to 10 minutes, depending mostly upon CPU speed. (Haven't
tried the automated utility, as I've no reason to trust it anymore than
I do their normal uninstaller.)



Another instance from my own experience. A couple of years ago I had
a second hard drive installed in my computer, and I installed Visual
Studio dot Net onto this drive. A few months later the drive died and
I was not in a position to replace it at that time. And I could not
run the uninstall for VS.NET because the files were no longer present
and I did not have the spare disk space to install it again on another
partition. In order to clean up my system and get all of the file
associations etc. sorted out I ended up using a registry cleaner. It
removed something like 15,000 entries related to VS.NET from the
registry. Needless to say doing that manually would have been quite a
daunting task.


Ron Martell Duncan B.C. Canada


I'll concede that a good registry scanning tool, in the hands of an
experienced and knowledgeable technician or hobbyist can be a useful
time-saving tool, as long as it's not allowed to make any changes
automatically. But I really don't think that there are any registry
cleaners that are truly safe for the general public to use.


--

Bruce Chambers

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