What Is The Best Registry Cleaner?
Windows Registry is nothing more than a constantly expanding database used in all Microsoft Windows operating system which keeps all the settings, options, preferences, and hardware options of the user. It keeps growing every time you use Windows. Every time your computer starts up, it first reviews the registry to let all installed software know the settings, documents, program paths, and a lot more stuff. The registry slowly gets bloated junk this way, and this slowly leads to a deterioration in the computer’s performance.
When you install and then uninstall a piece of software, traces of the program will be left in the Windows registry database also.
This is what sucks — Once you’ve made changes to the registry, you can’t undo it without specialized software (or manual editing).
Manually editing the registry is a nightmare and is not something the average computer user should try. Rule of thumb: the best registry is always a virgin registry.
Since the days of Win 95, the majority of software applications will deliberately leave behind entries in Windows registry to preserve licensing information, which aren’t removed during an uninstall. This left over “stuff” continues to pile up until a registry cleaner program is used to get clean it out.
Another thing to keep in mind, many computer crashes will further corrupt your registry.
The criteria of a good registry cleaner
Registry cleaners are supposed to scan the registry, locate, and remove any no longer needed entries in there. But that is the ideal scenario. The reality is, there is no perfect registry cleaner. All registry cleaners have complex formulas which help them “identify” what is a vital key and what is trash. There’s no way of forseeing if deleting a registry entry will impact system performance in subtle ways. Therefore, any good registry cleaner should allow you to backup your registry before you start repairing the registry.
Here is a manual way to back-up your registry nice and easy:
Click Start - Run
Type in the words - regedit (which will open the registry editor window)
From the box, hit File - Export
Save it with a name you can remember, preferably including the date
When you look around, there are really 4 kinds of registry cleaners:
Deep scanning registry cleaners
Surface scan registry cleaners
Balanced scan registry cleaners
Virus infected registry cleaners
A deep cleaner is actually dangerous to your computer because it may delete some important registry keys by being overzealous. A light scanning program, isn’t much use either; it simply skims the surface. A fake registry cleaner is dangerous, since it is spyware cloaked as a registry cleaner. Don’t download anything just because it’s free!
The “best” registry cleaner is one that:
Defrags the registry
Offers backups of the registry
Asks you if you want to delete each entry and offers alternatives
Perform other functions BESIDES registry work
Rather than just putting up with the slow speed of your system and the never-ending blue-screens, you can actually do something about it. Do yourself a favor and get yourself a good registry cleaner. It will help your computer run as smoothly and quickly as the day you bought it.
