Question About Program CCleaner

I Got a Question About Program CCleaner.

Is it safe to RUN The Registry Cleaner?

Do the Fixes?

Thank You

Marty

CCleaner is great little program, I use it myself every other day or so. But I would not fool around with the registry, removing items from the registry wont make your computer run any faster and remove the wrong entries or entry can do some damage, maybe even prevent your computer from booting up

Ken545,

Thank You for responding so fast,

I beleive you gave very sound advice.

Just what if any are the problems with the Registry, when a program like ccleaner reports you do indeed have problems?

Sounds redundant, but I believe you know what I'm getting at..

Thanks,

Marty

The reason "Registry Cleaners" are out there, is because many people wrongly believe that using them will improve the performance of their computer, so developers create them and/or include them in with other tools, to improve their saleability.

What most "Registry Cleaners" do, is look for Registry "orphans", using the premise that these redundant entries will slow down your computer, and that removing them will therefore speed it up.

This is utter nonsense.

The Registry is remarkably tolerant of orphans, and will happily run with thousands and thousands of them without any perceptible deterioration in performance. A colleague once artificially introduced 20,000 orphan entries into the Registry of his computer, monitoring its performance before and after they were introduced. He was unable to record any difference whatsoever.

Most "Registry Cleaners" generally don't find anything like that number on an average machine. Usually you're talking a few dozen, a few hundred at most.

So, having orphans does not appear to be a problem, and you may think ….. "well lets remove them anyway" ….. well here's why you shouldn't do that ….

First of all, you only have the "Registry Cleaners" word for it, that what it is removing is actually an orphan. But what if it's not. What if it's a "mission critical" entry, and removing it causes your system to crash, or become unbootable.

To be completely safe to use, a "Registry Cleaner" would have to know what every Registry entry, for every version ever written, of every program on your computer is there for, and be able to determine which ones are safe to remove.

If there is such a "Cleaner" out there, I have certainly never heard of it.

So to summarise …… no measurable performance gain from cleaning your registry …. appreciable risk to your computer if you do.

IMO, using them is a lose-lose situation, and people would be well advised to avoid them …… all of them.

   Very well said Gary

Thanks Ken.

I expect you're like me, and are fed up of having to help people put their machine right, after they've run one of these programs.

IMO some of the people who push them are little more than modern day "Snake Oil Salesmen".

Agreed

Thank You All For Your Advice.

It SURE MAKES SENSE TO AVOID REGISTRY CLEANERS.

Thanks again.

Marty

You're welcome Marty.

Take care Marty , thanks for stopping by

Ken