Re: Registry cleaners

Tech-Archive recommends: Fix windows errors by optimizing your registry

Terry R. wrote:
The date and time was Thursday, July 16, 2009 11:36:12 AM , and on a
whim, Bill in Co. pounded out on the keyboard:

John John - MVP wrote:
Franz Leu wrote:
John John - MVP schrieb:
Franz Leu wrote:
chicchio schrieb:
Hello !

I have used RegCleaner for a long time; I have read about newer
registry cleaners, like CCleaner or RegSeeker, and I am asking if I
must turn to these SW.
But, I am asking also: do I *really* need a registry cleaner ?
I seldom do install/uninstall, except som updates of SW that I
already have.
If I leave in the registry some old entries, what will be the result
?
My ideas about registry cleaners are a little confused, so can
someone help ?

Thanks in advance, Enrico
Just a side-note to think about:
If cleaning up the registry is useless, as many of you said in this
thread, why did Microsoft release the RegClean utility at times of
win98 - to speed-up(!) the PC ???
Nice try, but that ("to speed-up the PC") isn't the reason at all why
RegClean was developed. RegClean was first released with Microsoft
Visual Basic and its real purpose was to help applications developer
cleanup their programs registry entries while they were writing and
testing their applications, this had nothing *whatsoever* to do with
speeding up the computer, it was a programming tool, nothing more. It
is other third party individuals who started making speed claims and
who started suggesting that RegClean should be used for that dubious
purpose.


Excerpt from a MS support webpage:
<snip>
My Windows 98 Registry is working OK, but the associated files have
grown massively and there are loads of redundant entries in there.
You left this important part out of the excerpt:

"The articles set out below are articles created and/or produced by
Future Publishing Limited. Microsoft is not responsible for the
content, accuracy or opinions expressed in these articles."

You also seem to forget that Windows 98 and Windows NT operating
systems are completely different, the desktop and GUI may look similar
but under the hood these operating systems are as different as a Fiat
and a Lamborghini... or, at the risk of offending die hard Windows 98
fans, you are trying to compare a Lada with a Formula 1 race car!

Finally, you should also tell us why Microsoft decided to pull the
RegClean utility and remove it from all its download locations.
Thats an easy one ... it has never been developed further to support
newer OS. Using it on todays OS and Software (i.e. MS Office installed)
setups is even very dangerous.
It was pulled many years ago (during the ME days), it was causing
problems even on the DOS based operating systems, it wasn't necessarily
a problem with the newer Windows XP.

John

And unlike most others here, including Twain, I can testify to that,
firsthand, as Microsoft's old RegClean caused me some problems in my
Win98SE
system (some were related to Netscape, for example). And as you said,
John, they removed it from their site years ago.



One users experience. I had good results with it back then on
workstations. Would I let a user touch it? Never.

What does "good results" mean? I'm not denying that it can remove a few
spurious entries, but, big deal, and, so what? Nothing practical is really
gained. (I occasionally use one to *selectively* remove the most recent
file document list entries, which otherwise gets too cluttered, for
example). If someone doesn't know their way around regedit, for example,
they have no business even considering the use of such. And even if they
do know their waya around regedit, they know what is prudent (which is NOT
to run the automatic ones!)


.

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