10 Types of System Tools and Optimization Programs You Don’t Need on Windows

I forgot to respond to this thread. I disagree about not needing an outbound firewall. It´s always handy to know which apps want to phone home. And on old machines with not a lot of RAM, a Memory Optimizer can sometimes also be handy, I´m using MemInfo.

http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/System-Info/Meminfo.shtml

 

From Do we really need Windows registry cleaners?:

 

It's nice to have benchmarks done, as they are so rarely done to test the effects of cleaning the registry.

The result is pretty much as I expected. Only once have I witnessed a noticable increase in speed after cleaning the registry. Once I cleaned around 10,000 unneeded registry entries with multiple registry cleaners (being careful to choose one which don't give false positives, and don't remove potentially needed items like empty software keys, and emtpy registry keys in general), followed by a registry defrag, and noticied absoultely no difference in performance.

 

You disagree with a lot of the points because of your own experiences. As shown by several responses in this thread, the advice given is of a general nature and suitable for most less-technically inclined users.

The advice about using CCleaner's registry cleaning, for example, is fine as for most people it *generally* doesn't cause issues. If there were loads of reports all over the 'net about huge instabilities with the software, I think it would be safe to probably advise against using it.

It is interesting, though, why some people such as yourself have experienced such problems and others haven't. As I've said in the past, there has to be a reason, but due to the complexities of each and every computer configuration, we'll probably never get the right answer, unless people are prepared to work to nail it down.