Quote

Optimizing the Registry for a performance gains is an absolute myth...

Myth - "Registry Cleaners improve performance."

Reality - "A few hundred kilobytes of unused keys and values causes no noticeable performance impact on system operation. Even if the registry was massively bloated there would be little impact on the performance of anything other than exhaustive searches."
http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/2005/10/02/registry-junk-a-windows-fact-of-life.aspx

Welcome, Digg visitors. Wow, twice in three days an old post of mine gets picked up and Dugg like crazy. Just to be clear: If you have a specific problem with removing a specific program, a registry cleaning utility might be able to identify keys that will HELP you solve that specific problem. But that’s a rare scenario. Most people I know USE registry cleaners as part of their magic cleanup routine, and I see very little upside and a lot of potential downside in this sort of routine use. Specifically, as I write below, I have never seen any evidence that routine “cleaning” of the registry has any positive effect. I stand behind that statement.

I absolutely agree with everything said in this thread, I mean these so-called "registry cleaners" are totally useless, and as others have said they can even be quite dangerous; you see, in these various "orphaned" keys/values surely make registry files (and their respective backups) a bit bigger, but the sizes of registry-files themselves certainly don't degrade computer's performance, meaning that they don't have any impact on the the speed of registry operations nomather how many of them were left after some program was un-installed etc.


That's simply because the registry is demand-paged, and also because registry operations (like queries e.g. searching/reads, and writes) are not a linear process (I am quoting DriverGuru here so believe me that it's true)

The Windows registry is a massive database of almost every setting imaginable for every application on your system. It only makes sense that cleaning it out would improve performance, right? Sadly it’s just a marketing gimmick designed to sell registry cleaner products, as the reality is quite different… registry cleaners only remove a very small number of unused keys, which won’t help performance when you consider the hundreds of thousands of keys in the registry.

The myth about Registry Cleaning was busted and yeah, it's true you won't see a big improvement after using those cleaners but they're good for general cleaning (like recently used files which or temporary stored in different folders even registry values).

WARNING: It's good to add that some Registry Cleaners or dangerous, since they try to clean what they shouldn't and that could make you OS unstable. With XP most of them were harmless but with Vista even those could be dangerous.

"WinXSX" is one of the causes behind this danger. That directory is a massive library of .dll files which they constantly update whith every new application installed (that why it grows in size) for compatibility purpose. Some registry cleaners aren't capable of understating that and they delete the registry value of old or recently installed .dll files. That could lead to applications incompatibility or SO instability.

There's a wide variety of opinion on registry cleaners. Many people believe that they're important tools to keep your system running smoothly.

My opinion's a little different.

•

I rarely use a registry cleaner. In fact, I've never actually felt that I've needed to use a registry cleaner. And I definitely install and play with random things on my machine on a regular basis.

My fundamental belief is that the best registry cleaner is no registry cleaner at all. Most people simply don't need it, and don't need to run one.
"My fundamental belief is that the best registry cleaner is no registry cleaner at all."

Many people reach for a registry cleaner when an application is having problems, or when Windows is misbehaving. The problem is that these types of situations rarely respond to registry "cleaning" - it often requires application or Windows-specific resolution.

So when is registry cleaning appropriate? Besides rarely?

I would identify two cases:

*

As one of the last steps in an attempt to speed up Windows or if nothing else has really helped.
*

As one of the last steps in an attempt to resolve Windows or applications crashes that nothing else has helped.

In both cases, I consider it one of the last resorts because while it might help, it's just not that likely to help much.

But as I said, there are those that disagree with this position. And, to be honest, registry cleaners are unlikely to do any damage. Naturally you should take care to always be backed up properly, but unless you explicitly select advanced or aggressive options meant for the more advanced (or aggressive) users, you're unlikely to hurt anything with one of the recommended registry cleaners. It can happen, but it's rare.

It may fix problems on your PC and that's about it I guess. It sort of increases your performance a bit if you were having registry issues of that kind.

BUT other than that worry about how much ram you got, what video card you using and what processor you got! That's the meat of your PC anyway. Registry is just for the windows operating system.