Registry Cleaning - Is There Any Point?

Oblivion

I used to use PC Tools Registry Mechanic until they stopped supporting it in 2013. I was thinking this morning that my Windows 7 Ultimate (32 bit) registry is probably full of old crap and loose ends, but does it really matter.

Googling reveals much divided opinion on whether there is any merit in using a registry cleaner.

I'm interested in what your opinions are and if you do favour regular cleaning what your recommended cleaning software is (preferably free).

AndyPix

Let windows handle the registry.
It is not supposed to be "cleaned" and doing so will do absolutely zero in the way of any positive impact on your PC's performance.
At best nothing will happen, at worst (and more likely) you will break stuff


Id love to hear some comments from anyone who is of the opinion that registry cleaning is recommended, and to hear their reasons for this ..

onomatopoeia99

AndyPix wrote: »

Id love to hear some comments from anyone who is of the opinion that registry cleaning is recommended, and to hear their reasons for this ..

Won't hear them from me, it's about as useful as defragmenting an NTFS drive.

Both things that "power users" do regularly ...

Fightsback

onomatopoeia99 wrote: »

it's about as useful as defragmenting an NTFS drive.

Disable autodefrag on W7 or above and see what happens to your spinning rust over time. You either have not come across properly or don't have any idea about the NTFS file system (c.f. EXT4).

As for a registry cleaner, if it ain't broke don't break it by fixing it.

AndyPix

NTFS systems will still fragment over time, but no where near as much as FAT
And arguably not enough to cause any noticable difference due to the way NTFS allocates blocks.


I have never defragged a drive in my life and all my machines are fine.
Probly due to the fact that Fightsback points out that there is an autodefrag on W7 that i knew nothing about!


Schooldays

spud17

AndyPix wrote: »

NTFS systems will still fragment over time, but no where near as much as FAT
And arguably not enough to cause any noticable difference due to the way NTFS allocates blocks.


I have never defragged a drive in my life and all my machines are fine.
Probly due to the fact that Fightsback points out that there is an autodefrag on W7 that i knew nothing about!


Schooldays

Can't remember about Win 7, but a clean install of Win 8 and 10 will schedule a run of 'Optimize' which will either run defrag or Trim depending on the disk type, spinning disk or SSD.
Win key + s put in 'Defrag and Optimise' schedule can be altered or run manually, or turn it off for certain disks.

onomatopoeia99

Fightsback wrote: »

Disable autodefrag on W7 or above and see what happens to your spinning rust over time. You either have not come across properly or don't have any idea about the NTFS file system (c.f. EXT4).

Yes. It deals with it automatically, which is why there is no point in doing it manually. That said, it doesn't suffer with fragmentation to the extent the FATnn systems did anyway.

esuhl

Oblivion wrote: »

Googling reveals much divided opinion on whether there is any merit in using a registry cleaner.

I'm interested in what your opinions are and if you do favour regular cleaning what your recommended cleaning software is (preferably free).

Nooooo! Windows 98 and earlier suffered all sorts of registry corruptions, and the OS itself was so flaky that minor registry inconsistencies seemed to cause all sorts of problems. Even Microsoft produced a basic registry cleaner:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/kb/183887

Windows XP was much more stable. Using a registry cleaner was more likely to introduce errors than to fix them. Using one in Vista onwards would be crazy.

The only time when one might come in handy would be where you know you have a potential issue and running a quick scan will help you pinpoint it. You can then delete/modify just that value.

I'd never ever suggest just applying all the changes "recommended" by a registry cleaner. They simply aren't intelligent enough.

Also, a default installation of Windows includes certain registry keys/values that are not used until additional software is installed. A registry cleaner would see these as orphaned entries and want to delete them, when they are supposed to be there.

d0nkeyk0ng

Back in the days of Windows 95, I used to sit there and clean out the registry manually. Wouldn't bother now.

Defragging used to help a lot back then and I still do it occasionally but only to speed up read/write access when dealing with large files.

Oblivion

Thanks for the responses guys and some interesting observations.


I think I shall be leaving the registry well alone unless and until an issue crops up.

esuhl

d0nkeyk0ng wrote: »

Back in the days of Windows 95, I used to sit there and clean out the registry manually. Wouldn't bother now.

Same here. There was always a risk of totally screwing up your system with the automated tools (although the risk was often worth taking if it was already unusable!).

I actually learnt a bit about how the registry is set up by running the cleaners to see what changes they suggested, but then exiting (before any changes were applied) and examining the registry myself.

Also, another reason that registry cleaners aren't needed is that Vista onwards introduced UAC and registry virtualisation, which effectively sandboxes system-wide registry changes. So software should no longer be able to screw up your system with registry modifications.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa965884(v=vs.85).aspx