Registry Cleaners

What is currently the best free registry cleaner to use?

 

TweakNow hasn't messed my system up yet, so I would have to recommend that one. I tried another one a while back, and it deleted some stuff it shouldn't have, and messed my computer up (can't remember the name of the one I tried before, but just be careful with them and what they delete).

 

Like any software, you will get almost as many opinions as responses! Most of them do the job, but some are more aggessive than others and that's where the danger lies! Most can be safely used in their 'Std', 'Easy', or 'Novice' mode, while their more aggressive mode ('Expert' or the like) is more likely to result in removing entries that are needed.

The best advice I can give you is that whichever one you try, use it's backup provisions before each cleanup. If the reg cleaner doesn't have an integrated backup mode, create a System Restore point before executing the cleanup!

 

After cleaning use ERUNT to defrag it. Free and Amazing!!

 

I guess you meant Ntregopt ...


1. To make the registry as compact as possible, and registry hives and system files defragmented to minimal number of fragments (contiguous), there are two free and "non-setup" programs (only a .zip archive and no installation required ...) that do this job perfectly, ehm, actually they work somehow in cooperation one with another. One program is called Ntregopt from Larshederer homepage: http://www.larshederer.homepage.t-online.de, http://www.larshederer.homepage.t-online.de/erunt/index.htm, which optimizes the registry hives, i.e. it recreates each registry hive "from scratch", so therefore you need to run it just before rebooting.


And I got used to use Ntregopt in cooperation with yet another free "non-setup" application called Pagedfrg from Sysinternals site: http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/PageDefrag.html, but this one doesn't optimize the structure of registry hives, it's in fact capable of defragmenting them. Additionally, it also defragments the pagefile and event viewer's logfiles (three files with .evt extension), and also it is run after booting, i.e. just before the "pre-logon" screen after chkdsk finishes checking the disk (of course if it was set to do so), so it is run in a manner, that if I re-structured my registry hives with Ntregopt before rebooting computer, they are defragmented when still being "fresh" on the next boot.


/NOTE: from Ntregopt's home-page:

The program works by recreating each registry hive "from scratch", thus removing any slack space that may be left from previously modified or deleted keys.
Note that the program does NOT change the contents of the registry in any way, nor does it physically defrag the registry files on the drive (as the PageDefrag program from SysInternals does). The optimization done by NTREGOPT is simply compacting the registry hives to the minimum size possible.

And while your are at the Larshederer's site, also check the Erunt program. It's a program used to backup the registry, while I especially like its sub-program Autoback contained in the same .zip archive as Ntregopt and Erunt; for a more detailed description of both programs see the page "events1.html", the 14.3.2005 entry. Erunt and Autoback are command-line programs and both are very handy to backup the registry on/after boots (I do it with a batch file so that there's no interaction at all), i.e. I've put the shortcut to that batch file into %ALLUSERSPROFILE%\Start Menu\Programs\Startup\ directory so that it backups registry nomather with which account one logs-on.


2. But anyway, in general these so-called "registry cleaners" are useless, and they can even be quite dangerous. Optionally see this article: Ed Bott: Why I don't use registry cleaners (my own comments are posted as/by "Ivan Tadej"), however, there is one exception ... I use a Registry First Aid program: http://www.RoseCitySoftware.com/Reg1Aid from RoseCitySoftware that might be called a "registry cleaner", but I rather call it "registry maintainer", since it doesn't clean the registry automatically (like most of "registry cleaners" do), 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.


/NOTE: 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 etc.)


You see, in general these various "orphaned" keys/entrys/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 (DriverGuru's own words); for further info on this subject, also see my very own article on my home-site, the page "articles.html": http://users.volja.net/tayiper/articles.html below under "REGISTRY-CLEANING SOFTWARE MYTH EXPOSED" entry, and also a related thread on ArsTechnica: Keeping the registry tidy : How DO you do it ?!


best regards, stalker

 

To answer the question:
FREE- RegSeeker. Does a superb job.

 

Wouldn't go near YOUR registry let alone mine.

Tried stuff that says it backs it up; scanned, cleaned then had problems and I couldn't restore the registry after either.
Had to format C/: