Re: About Registry Cleaners
- From: Bob I <birelan@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 09 May 2008 09:26:34 -0500
WinXP will fix it itself. There isn't a "user initiated" option.
Brad wrote:
Hi,
Doesn't WinXP have a built in "SCANREG" as does Windows 98SE?
On a Win98 computer, I have often used the command (in Dos mode),
"SCANREG /FIX /OPT" . Only recently, I bought a WinXP laptop, but I didn't
search for a SCANREG or it's equivalent yet.
Brad
On Tue, 6 May 2008 17:42:11 -0400, in microsoft.public.windowsxp.general you
wrote:
"Malke" wrote...
Tony wrote:
One thing I did that really stopped WinXP from crashing was a program
called RegSeeker. You can download it from most reputable free download
websites. It has a "Clean the Registry" feature that gets rid of lots of
crap that affect performance and crashes systems.
This is terrible advice. Registry cleaners are snake oil at best, at worst
they will hose Windows entirely. You may have had luck using RegSeeker but
you were indeed one of the lucky few. The registry does not need cleaning.
There is no "crap" in XP's registry that will affect performance and crash
systems; that sounds good but it isn't how Windows works. Having some extra
entries in the registry doesn't matter.
Sorry, but there can be plenty of crap in the registry. There are two cases that are
easy to make, and they are both due to stuff left over by uninstalled programs that had
not been properly uninstalled.
First:
You can have programs that were uninstalled that left crap in the registry. Some of them
are leftover ActiveX controls that are still loaded and still use resources. And some of
these leftover ActiveX controls can cause conflicts that can cause the computer to
become unstable - which possibly was why the program was uninstalled in the first
place - and if the program's designer couldn't even uninstall his program correctly,
it's possible that he couldn't write an ActiveX control properly.
Second:
In most cases, when the registry needs to be accessed, it is accessed directly from
disk. It's easy to understand that the bigger the registry, the longer it takes to
access the desired registry key. Now, of course by this logic it always speeds up the
computer by removing any unneeded entries, but the issue can be one of diminishing
returns - in a 5Meg NTUSER.DAT file, cleaning out a only dozen unloaded entries won't
cause a speedup that is perceptible by any human.
But you might see a noticable effect by cleaning out 100 unused entries - and I have
recently used RegSeeker to clean over 700 entries on an old WinXP machine that has given
the computer new life. BTW, the time difference in accessing the registry is not at the
CPU clock speed (would can be nanoseconds) but milliseconds - and that can really does
add up to seconds when your registry is bloated.
Having said all that, I will admit that most registry cleaners fall into one of two
categories - either they clean too little to be of any use at all (as in Symantec's
WinDoctor) or they clean too damn much and can render some programs unusable (as in
V-COM's RegistryFixer). I feel that RegSeeker is "just right"; however, I have only
cleaned out registry entries marked as "green" (it weighs the danger of removing an
entry as green, yellow, red).
And if you know the history of the system, and if you've never uninstalled any programs,
a registry cleaner won't do much good.
Oh, I almost forgot - if you uninstall Norton AntiVirus, if you run a registry cleaner
and then re-install Norton, your antivirus subscription can be reset (assuming that you
are silly enough to use Norton in the first place).
FYI, I am a hardware design engineer so I tend to see these things from the hardware
standpoint.
Tony
.
- References:
- Re: About Registry Cleaners
- From: Brad
- Re: About Registry Cleaners
- Prev by Date: Re: Will be "CD-Burning" temp folder automatically cleaned after burning?
- Next by Date: Re: More Information About Environment
- Previous by thread: Re: About Registry Cleaners
- Next by thread: Re: About Registry Cleaners
- Index(es):
Relevant Pages
|
