Stephen said:
... We use ... and Regclean. ...
So are you an expert at registry editing and restoration?
Do you have a backup & restore plan in place? When (and not if) the
registry cleaner corrupts your registry and when you can no longer boot
into Windows, just how are you going to restore that OS partition so it
is usable again? Even if you use a registry cleaner that provides for
backups of its changes so you can revert back to the prior state, how
are you going to perform that restore if you cannot boot the OS after
hosing over its registry? What about entries in the registry that look
to be orphaned under the current OS load instance but are used under a
different OS environment? You delete what looks orphaned only to find
out that they are required under a different environment.
Say there was an unusually high amount of orphaned entries in your
registry, like 4MB. By deleting the orphaned entries, you would speed
up how long it takes Windows to load the registry's files when it starts
up - by all of maybe 1 second. Oooh, aaah. All that risk of modifying
the registry to save maybe a second, or less, during the Windows
startup. Most folks that clean the registry end up deleting only 10KB,
or less. They are doing nothing to improve their Windows load time.
Since the registry is only read from the memory copy of it, and since
memory is random access, there is no difference to read one byte of the
registry (in memory) from the another byte in the registry (also in
memory). The extra data in memory for orphaned entries has no effect on
the time to retrieve items from the memory copy of the registry.
Cleaning the registry will NOT improve performance in reading from the
memory copy of the registry. The reduced size of the registry's .dat
files might reduce the load time of Windows by all of a second and
probably much less. And you want to risk the stability of your OS for
inconsequential changes to its registry? The same boobs that get
suckered into these registry cleanup "tools" are the same ones that get
suckered into the memory defragment "tools".
A registry cleaner should only be used if you yourself can correctly
cleanup the registry. The cleaner is just a tool to automate the same
process but you should know every change that it intends to make and
understand each of those changes. After all, and regardless of the
stagnant expertise coded into the utility, *YOU* are the final authority
in what registry changes are performed whether you do it manually or
with a utility. If YOU do not understand the proposed change (which
requires the product actually divulge the proposed change before
committing that change), how will you know whether or not to allow that
change?
