Registry Boosters, Anybody use these on your pc ?
 

Anyone ? Please speak freely of the do's or don't, the advantages of them............

Generally i've found many of these automated tools that mess with your registry, windows, etc screw things up rather than help things out.

I remember the dreaded "First Aid 95" and what that did to my system back in the day..

I have tried the uniblue version, so far it seems to be doing OK. It seems to boot up faster and once a week it scans or I can manual scan .

Basically it seems to find the same repairs most of the time......... what's up with that?

The registry is basically nothing but a file system that holds really small text files. Any software author may read and/or write to it in their installer or their code. It is then up to them to remove anything they add. Several don't, so the registry gets bloated over time.

This wouldn't be as big an issue if it weren't for the fact that when Windows boots it loads the entire registry into memory. That's why people get speed gains the first time they run a "registry cleaner". It shrinks the size of the registry by removing entries that the actual developer wasn't kind enough to clean up.

As for finding the same repairs over and over, it's likely that it's removing keys that are used by one of your apps and that app is constantly having to replace them so it can run.

my experience with any of these registry cleaner,booster,compacting programs has not been good.

it seems like they almost alway screw something up.


imo you just just leave your registry alone unless you know something very specific that needs done. And even then you backup it up before making even a small change.

Yeah.... and then install Syncronys SoftRAM... it like doubles your RAM... Amazing!!

And then be sure and compress your hard drive.... you'll create a ton of space!!

And seriously don't listen to me....

It's a bad idea...

ROFL

You want speed gains?

Install TinyXP.

http://www.demonoid.com/files/details/387805/5244375/

I don't recommend using stuff like this.

You're better off going to one of the various tweak sites and just reading about how to streamline your OS to get better performance.

Some of the "big name" utility companies like Norton or Fix-it Utilities do a decent job of cleaning up some crap in the registry, but I've never noticed a huge difference in performance. Any others seem to cause more problems than they help to fix.

I used Uninstall Pro works pretty well in finding unreferenced items in registry.

Backup registry first.

I tend to shy away from Norton, McAfee, and the other major software companies.

Their code has become almost as bloated as Microsoft's.

I don't want to hijack this thread, but I'm interested in this point. I just got a Dell, with a bunch of bloatware. It does, however, include 15 months of McAfee for free. I'm planning to reinstall the OS to rid myself of the bloatware, but I had also planned to reload McAfee to take advantage of the free 15 months. I understand it's a bit of a hog, but I've got a dual core processor, 2 meg of RAM and 320 gigs of HD space, so I didn't figure I'd have much performance degredation. Do you disagree?

Now back to your regularly scheduled registry cleaner/booster discussion....