registry cleaners

I am thinking of purchasing either ace utilities or registry mechanic. My 2 year old dell computer with xp home edition is slow at times and not performing as well as it used to. I have 512 ram & 40 g hard drive. Can you tell me which one would be the safest to use? I have my registry backed up to an external hard drive.

 

The safest and one of the best is still the free one.

Regcleaner 4.3.0.780 is still free here:

ftp://ftp.wifak.uni-wuerzburg.de/sy.../RegCleaner.exe

For registry "compaction" and "defragging", use the free NTregopt and ERUNT to make a backup of the registry. Both in this package:

http://home.t-online.de/home/lars.hederer/erunt/erunt.zip

The registry is rarely the cause of the gradual slowdown that computers seem to suffer from. You should scan for ad- and spy-ware and check your Task Manager to see what processes use the most CPU. Do they need to be running (programs---XP services use no CPU unless performing a task)?

And a good chkdsk for disk errors and a complete defrag of the drive, registry, and pagefile will help.

Pagedefrag will defragment the registry hives and pagefile on boot:
http://www.sysinternals.com/files/pagedfrg.zip

 

Thank you, I will try that. I heard that regcleaner doesn't work on xp. Is that true?

 

You're thinking of Microsoft's RegClean which is not recommended. The RegCleaner above works fine on XP.

 

Hey, your first link doesn't appear to be working to me. Could you possibly post a new link for RegCleaner?

 

http://www.majorgeeks.com/download460.html

 

Yeh. They shut down that ftp pretty fast. But it is still out there for free at 100's of places. These are all the famous 430780 version:

ftp://212.0.117.178/pub/Tweaks/RegCleaner v4.3.0.780.exe
ftp://80.255.128.148/pub/ftp/windows/utils/RegCleaner.exe
ftp://217.97.131.114/RegCleanerXP/RegCleaner.exe

 

Everyone's experience is different with registry cleaners. I've never had much luck (or respect) for any freebie registry cleaner I've ever tried. Seems the good ones are always store-bought. Here's the ones I use...

On-Track's Registry Fixer from Ontrack's Fix-It Utilities

RegHeal

and, RegSupreme

 

It seems my experience has been the exact opposite. My first re-installation was due to the havoc wreaked by System Mechanic. Other purchased reg cleaners have disabled devices and unregistered some software.

There are many talented people with integrity that produce freeware. Many start out free to test the waters.

Jouni Vuorio's RegCleaner is well-known and has an excellent reputation as being both thorough and safe.

 

I use On-Track's Registry Fixer from Ontrack's Fix-It Utilities too and it works well for me.

 

The V-COM one that followed after OnTrack stopped making the utility has caused me no problems so far.

 

I'm so glad to see this became a congenial thread about peoples suggestions. I just got through one of those (no, two) threads on another site with someone, who just "insists" his is the better alternative.

Check this out, and be happy you hang with nice folks at Tech Support who allow for other opinions...

http://www.graphixanstuff.com/Forum/index.php?showtopic=57

 

From the Admin there:
"Ok, Ive taken the liberty of cleaning things up here a bit."

We must have missed the good parts.