Registry cleaner?

"If Microsoft made a registry cleaner then I would recommend it, but they don't." Mark56.

Perhaps Microsoft should think about developing something for this purpose. Sometimes they misjudge the market.

Re learninmypc's post above, I wonder is it TechSpot policy to close a thread if one respondent's opinion differs from another's? I seem to have missed the message saying that registry cleaners are necessary, but I have seen several arguing intelligently that they are a bad idea, likewise that they can be effective and helpful. Surely censorship of opinion isn't the answer?

Profoundly reassuring - thanks for that, Leeky

Ok, thanks Leeky.

In addition to what has already been said, I'm against them in general because I ended up using a pc as a door stop because I didn't listen to those that know.
If you must use one, you MUST back up the registry. Better safe than sorry.
From a friend of mine;

"I'm sure I've gathered a lot of crap in my travels.

Yup, probably. But those orphans and duplicates are all harmless and will not be negatively impacting on the performance of your system. Were registry cleaning *really* able to improve performance, the developers of these utilities would support their marketing claims with some form of empirical evidence (performance prior to cleaning -vs- performance post cleaning). But have you ever seen such benchmarking? No, and that's because registry cleaning does *not* improve perforance. Think about it ... programs such as SpywareBlaster dump 1000's of entries into the registry without causing any performance hit. Similarly, the fact that registries tend to hold significantly more information than in years gone by (bigger hard disks = more programs installed/data stored = more registry entries) has not resulted in systems slowing to a crawl.

Using an automated cleaner to try to fix a problem is akin to using a shotgun to remove an appendix. The best way to deal with (possibly) registry-related issues is is to throughly research the problem and then use regedit to make any necessary changes and/or deletions (having first set a restore point or created a backup)."

Using regedit and trying to identify what specific registy entry corresponds with what particular program is a disaster waiting to happen for the novice user.

I have used many registry cleaners over the years and have never ended up with a "door stop" for a pc.

Orphans and duplicates may be harmless, but they take up space and hard drives cost money.

And yes, Auslogics gives you a performance benchmark before and after registry defragmentation. The diffrence can be a couple of seconds boot time.

I totally agree, Fimbles - also, logically if your system has to read a bunch of disused/orphaned entries, it must take a finite amount of time & power (ok, it could just be milliseconds, I haven't checked!)