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What are your thoughts on registry cleaners?

(a preface from a recent AMA)

Technically, I think we all realize that registry cleaners do nothing to boost performance. Removing even a few thousand registry values from a hive with hundreds of thousands of keys is not going to make a difference. Rebuilding registry hives from scratch may help to optimize the data, but that is different from cleaning. Also, deletion of keys often cause damage to software installations. I see it all the time with my software. Registry cleaners don't associate the installed application "Process Lasso" with the registry key named "ProcessLasso".

So, why are registry cleaners used? Well, aside from users who don't know better, Registry Cleaners do fulfil the psychological need some have to keep things tidy.

However, there *is* the legitimate use case of clearing usage 'tracks' from your registry. For instance, browsing history. Therefore, that type of cleaning does have function. Usually the applications themselves offer this same type of data sanitization, and are able to do it more correctly in most cases. The value of some common cleaners is in merging the user data purge function of multiple applications into a single interface.


Legacy article follows.

The Truth About Registry Cleaners

Registry cleaning will never boost PC performance, though it may inadvertently delete a few important registry keys. It's a natural thing to want to clear out leftover registry debris, but when your registry has millions of stored values, there isn't much use in removing even tens of thousands of them. Further, the registry is designed to store bits of data, it's essentially a database, thus is quickly indexed. No application is ever forced to wait to retrieve a registry value, such an operation is just too fast.

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 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 rebuilding the hives from scratch (described elsewhere on this page) boosts performance. This is in line with theoretical predictions. Your registry has hundreds of thousands of keys and is loaded into virtual memory in an optimal data structure allowing for very rapid access. 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. This removes slack space from deleted values and optimizes the storage of the registry hives. There are some freeware utilities to do this (e.g. NTRegOpt), 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.

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