[Stoner]

Originally Posted by jfarc539

................. "If you have'nt tried it, don't knock it" This is my first day on this site, I am an intermediate player and I expected members to be more professional responding to another members questions or comments.
jfarc539

I have tried them.
And I knock them from my experiences.
This is a topic that is repeated so frequently, it ought to be a sticky.

[JohnWill]

Some of the many reasons not to use them.

Disadvantages

Due to the small size of the registry hive, its performance impact is almost negligible. Some registry cleaners make no distinction as to the severity of the errors, and many that do may erroneously categorize errors as "critical" with little basis to support it.

Registry damage

Most notably, critics say there is no reliable way for a third party program to know whether any particular key is invalid, redundant or neither. Poorly designed registry cleaners may not know for sure whether a key is still being used by Windows or what detrimental effects removing it may have. This has led to examples of registry cleaners causing loss of functionality and/or system instability.[2][3]

Malware

The benefits of Registry cleaners have been used by a number of trojan applications to install malware, typically through social engineering attacks that use website popups. Rogue registry cleaner "WinFixer" has been ranked as one of the most prevalent pieces of malware currently in circulation.[5]

Scareware

Rogue registry cleaners are often marketed with alarmist advertisements that falsely claim to have pre-analyzed your PC, displaying bogus warnings to take "corrective" action, hence the reason that they are sometimes called "scareware". In October 2008, Microsoft and the Washington attorney general filed a lawsuit against two Texas firms, Branch Software and Alpha Red, producers of the "Registry Cleaner XP" scareware.[6] The lawsuit alleges that the company sent incessant pop-ups resembling system warnings to consumers' personal computers stating "CRITICAL ERROR MESSAGE! - REGISTRY DAMAGED AND CORRUPTED", before instructing users to visit a web site to download Registry Cleaner XP at a cost of $39.95.

Marginal performance benefit

On Windows 9x computers, it is possible that a very large registry could slow down the computer's startup time. However this is far less of an issue with NT-based Operating Systems (including Windows XP and Vista) due to a different on-disk structure of the registry, improved memory management and indexing.[7] Slowdown due to registry bloat is thus far less of an issue in modern versions of Windows. More importantly, however, the difference in speed due to the use of a registry cleaner is negligible: rarely do they remove more than a few kilobytes from the total size of the registry. In fact, technology journalist Ed Bott has claimed that no-one has ever successfully managed to measure any significant performance increase from the use of a registry cleaner.[8] Any potential user of a registry cleaner must thus balance a probably negligible performance increase against the possibility of system instability. A safer and more measurable approach to Registry performance is to defragment the Registry files using a Microsoft-supported tool such as PageDefrag.[9]

[jfarc539]

John, I will check your site info at http://en.wikipedia.org if you will check mine at www.webopedia.com
jfarc539

[da_ab]

fortunately the disavantages doesn't apply to ccleaner.
see the most popular download
http://www.filehippo.com/popular/

[PCcruncher]

Being the most popular download, doesn't mean it always works.
I for one use it a lot, but only to remove Temp files Etc. and never use the reg cleaning part.

[WhitPhil]

[Stoner]

I also use Ccleaner for removing temp files.
But never use the registry cleaner.

[JohnWill]

I have actually used the registry cleaner, but only in a "supervised" mode. When I know there are a bunch of entries because I'm deleting some stuff that won't uninstall, I run it. I also review ALL the stuff it's going to do before turning it loose. It's really an automated registry editor the way I use it. As far as just pointing it to the registry and letting it do it's thing automatically, that's a foolish move IMO!