Facts about Registry Cleaners

Poorly written registry cleaners cause damage

This is a fact. Many of the Application Compatibility Updates you get from Microsoft are to fix damage to critical OS registry keys. There is simply no way for a registry cleaner to know for certain whether a key is still in use or not. It therefore has to make an educated guess. A well written cleaner will avoid mistakes, but a poorly written one will delete many important keys.

Registry cleaners are often far too aggressive

Since registry cleaners often try to beat their competition by increasing the count of keys deleted, many tend is to be overly aggressive when deleting keys.

Removal of registry keys does not boost performance

Unreleased third-party benchmarks using RegBench have shown that popular registry cleaners ran on a typical real-world PC do not boost registry performance one bit. Only the method described above boosts performance. This is in line with theoretical predictions. Your registry has hundreds of thousands of keys. Your registry is loaded into virtual memory in an optimal data structure allowing for very quick traversal (searches). Deleting a few hundred (or even thousand) keys isn't going to make it perform faster. Some people suggest that utilities that correct keys with errorneous values may speed the system, if those errorneous values were slowing it down. However, we consider these the 'registry repair' genre instead of 'registy cleaner'.

The best theoretical way to boost registry performance is ...

The best theoretical way to boost registry performance is NOT by deleting keys, but instead by rebuilding the registry hives from scratch and/or defragmenting the backing hive files (in the case of HDDs). There are many freeware utilities to do this, but be careful with them as some are incompatible with Vista+ and may result in an unbootable system. Before use, make a backup of your registry hive files and be sure you know how to restore them in the event they are corrupted. It is also important to remember that any gains to registry performance are likely to very marginal, and probably nothing you do to the registry will substantially increase overall system performance.

For more information about Registry Cleaners in general, see the Wikipedia article on the subject.

Registry Cleaner Damage Repair

This is a pre-announcement of a new project we are working on, a fix for registry cleaner damage. Here we DIFFERENTIATE 'registry cleaner' from 'registry repair'. The former simply deletes garbage from the registry, which the latter repairs invalid references and missing values.

SYNOPSIS

This project is all about repairing the damage made by many popular registry cleaners. In the race for ever more aggressive registry cleaning, many registry cleaners end up deleting keys necessary to the proper functionality of the OS and installed applications. The cumulative effect of running many registry cleaners over time can result in all sorts of strange errata. We aren't going to 'name names' or criticize the specific registry cleaners, we'll simply repair the damage. We also have no intention of getting in any debate about the usefulness of registry cleaners.

IMPLEMENTATION

This is a 100% free and open project meant to repair the damage done to the OS and installed applications by poorly written registry cleaners. To our knowledge, no project like this has ever existed. This project consists of 'repair sets', which are essentially lists of keys that should not have been deleted. These repair sets can be easily created with utilities we have created, or can be constructed manually. Their format will be the same as .REG files, meaning they'll be compatible with RegEdit. However, given the nature of the registry keys, where paths may sometimes need adjusted for a particular system, we must compliment these repair sets with a utility that properly applies the repair sets. The utility will also skip keys that already exist, to ensure that those values aren't over-written. In other words, its a little more than simple REG file import via RegEdit, which would replace existing registry values instead of just repair missing ones. Lastly, since OS damage is specific to each individual edition of Windows, the repair sets will be specific to editions of Windows.

We will soon host this project on an open WIKI, allowing anyone to contribute knowledge and repair sets. Our intention is for this project to be a community effort. By using the power of the entire community, we can freely repair the collective damage done by registry cleaners.

How to use RegCleanerFix

Simply download our little utility and it will determine your OS type, mark keys that need added back to the registry hive(s), then let you choose which keys you want to restore. This utility is set to be released very soon. It is currently in alpha testing, so be cautious!

External Links


RegCleanerFix

This tentatively named project will be a FREE and OPEN community effort to repair registry damage caused by some registry cleaners.

Related

Quick fix REG files

Do NOT use these REGistry imports unless you have the specifc problem they address. Further, backup your registry before using and use at your OWN RISK. To use them, simply double-click them and RegEdit will ask if you want to import their data or not. Select Yes if you do. If double-clicking them doesn't work, then a registry cleaner probably screwed up your .REG file association ;o.