Anything special about the Windows 7 x64 registry?

Probably the next frontier I will cross with my two new W7 x64 machines is light registry cleaning. I mostly use CCleaner on my XP boxes, but I am so familiar with them that I am fairly comfortable also using more agressive registry snaners/cleaners (Argente, ToniArts EasyCleaner, PowerTools Lite).

Is there anything special about the W7 x64 registry, that makes careful registry cleaning any different from XP and earlier?

 

Its larger. It has the x86 and the x64 portions of the registry. Until your familiar with the x64 counterpart Id use CCleaner.

 

MS describes the Windows 7 registry as 'self maintaining' and no need for 3rd party tools. I have asked on a couple windows websites what 'self maintaining' means exactly and never got a clear answer. I *think* it is more efficient at removing registry clutter after uninstalls and tries to keep the registry compacted, which prior Windows versions did not.

If you want to clean the registry for performance purposes, remember to reduce the memory footprint of the registry requires that you compact the registry after cleaning it. According to user reviews I have read this is a great way to cause a BSOD in Windows 7 and make the machine unbootable. With XP on the other hand, I used a couple registry cleaners and compacted the registry several times a year for several years without a single issue.

So at the end of the day I would either not worry about registry cleaning in Windows 7 or just use ccleaner and not more aggressive tools. If you don't mind spending time possibly dealing with issues/reformatting then I wouldn't mess with more aggressive cleaners/compactors in Windows 7.

 

I've cleaned and compacted Windows 7 x64 registry, using JV16 and IOLO System Mechanic, multiple times on multiple computers and have had no problems.

 

good to hear, I loved JV16 in XP, IMO the best reg cleaner/compactor and I even used the ancient 'regcleanr' from the same author back in early 2000's.

JV16 was one of the compactors people saying was causing BSOD' in win 7, that was right after Windows 7 came out though. I'm sure newer versions are much more stable. I still think its more risky to mess with the registry in Win7 than XP though.

optigrab if you do end up cleaning and compacting the Win7 registry, or anyone else that does, if you don't mind posting about stability of the machine after doing this I'd be interested

 

Thanks for the advice everyone. I'll proceed with all due caution. For the first several attempts at least; I'll stick to reg cleaning immediately after taking an image of my drive.

I'll post back here when I get around to an aggressive clean and compact effort. Could be a while though.