[Rich-M]

Originally Posted by NijimaSan

won't all those registry entries from uninstalled programs slow down the computer and cause it harm anyway?

No they mean nothing at all...

[Alkison]

Originally Posted by Rich-M

No they mean nothing at all...

So these companies are just trying to attack people without computer knowledge to gain big profit?

[Rich-M]

Originally Posted by Alkison

So these companies are just trying to attack people without computer knowledge to gain big profit?

In a word "yes" it's about making money!

[Elvandil]

Take a close look at the licenses for those programs. They make it very clear that they will not be around when your machine goes belly-up due to the use of their products. You are on your own.

There are some very limited circumstances within which some things may need to be removed from the registry. But we give the best advice about registry cleaning in the same sense that advice is given about hitting children. Children should never be hit, but the reasonable person knows that that does not mean "not knocked out of the path of a speeding train". But since some people take even the smallest permission and run with it, it is better to make the prohibition complete. If you need to ask whether a registry needs to be "cleaned", then you don't know enough about the registry to be using a cleaner.

If you know a great deal about the registry, and if you are willing to go through each item it finds and determine if the fix it makes is appropriate, and if you have some way of restoring the previous registry if the machine won't boot (because even an expert might make a mistake), then go ahead and use the cleaner. But keep in mind that after all that work, nothing will change, be better, or run better.

[Alkison]

Originally Posted by Rich-M

In a word "yes" it's about making money!

Wow, but I'm not surprised at the same time. What about Ccleaner, it doesn't clean file paths so is it okay to use?

[Elvandil]

Originally Posted by Alkison

Wow, but I'm not surprised at the same time. What about Ccleaner, it doesn't clean file paths so is it okay to use?

Ccleaner is just as bad as any and worse than some. There is no good one. It is not possible with the algorithms they use to create a safe one.

[flavallee]

Alkison:

I found one good use for CCleaner, and that's all it gets used for.

Its "Tools" section works well with the registry "Uninstall" menu so I can rename my installed programs with their actual names and version numbers.

The "Cleaner" and "Registry" sections are not used at all.

And I'm knowledgeable enough to manually make changes in the registry. I never allow a registry cleaner to do that, and neither should you.

----------------------------------------------------------------

[Rich-M]

Originally Posted by Alkison

Wow, but I'm not surprised at the same time. What about Ccleaner, it doesn't clean file paths so is it okay to use?

As the others have said I have hosed 2 systems too many with that one so it is just as unsafe to use.

[Alkison]

Wow, okay I never knew that. It's weird though, it definitely seems to help sometimes.

[Elvandil]

Originally Posted by Alkison

Wow, okay I never knew that. It's weird though, it definitely seems to help sometimes.

In what way?

If you are willing to experiment, try benchmarking your registry access speed (at times where the same amount of load would be on it, preferably with no other programs running).

You can benchmark your registry access speed to compare it at different times, or after a "defrag" ("compaction") to see if any real improvement in access speed occurred. The output of regbench HKLM -auto looks like this:

Benchmarking registry root:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE [HKLM] hKey: 0x80000002
/
== Keys in hive : 359169
== Enumeration time : 135625 ms (135.63 secs)
== Total accesses : 100000
== Total access time : 8609
== Time per access : 0.086090 ms
== Keys per second : 11615.75
== Total bytes read : 10000046
== Time to read all : 10157 ms
== Time per byte : 0.001010 ms per byte
== Bytes per second : 990099.00

[Alkison]

Originally Posted by Elvandil

In what way?

If you are willing to experiment, try benchmarking your registry access speed (at times where the same amount of load would be on it, preferably with no other programs running).

You can benchmark your registry access speed to compare it at different times, or after a "defrag" ("compaction") to see if any real improvement in access speed occurred. The output of regbench HKLM -auto looks like this:

Benchmarking registry root:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE [HKLM] hKey: 0x80000002
/
== Keys in hive : 359169
== Enumeration time : 135625 ms (135.63 secs)
== Total accesses : 100000
== Total access time : 8609
== Time per access : 0.086090 ms
== Keys per second : 11615.75
== Total bytes read : 10000046
== Time to read all : 10157 ms
== Time per byte : 0.001010 ms per byte
== Bytes per second : 990099.00

All right, i'll check it out when I get back from work.

[Alkison]

Okay, sorry to take so long to reply, how do I check this?