Thread: Registry cleaners

It is often said, especially by the vendors of such software, that regular Registry cleaning is an essential part of PC hygiene. Typically, vendors claim they cure problems that cause crashes, error messages and slow performance. Most will let you download a trial version that will diagnose your Registry problems. You then have to pay for the full product to have the problems fixed. The difficulty lies in judging just what, exactly constitutes a 'problem'. For example, if you open, save and close a file, then move or delete it, its old location will linger on in a MRU (most recently used) list. Windows keeps such a list for each file type and applications may also maintain their own. Although the existence of the lists themselves may be regarded as a privacy or security issue, only the very obsessive could consider the presence of dead links in these lists to be a problem.



We tried several Registry cleaners in the course of researching this feature and these recorded from 333 (PCPitstop) to 2,479 (Registry Easy) 'problems'. One
such cleaner with a good reputation is N16 Power Tools. It offers a fully functional free trial, and each change made can be backed up if desired. All Registry tuning applications should create a backup before making any changes, but we'd recommend making a System Restore point before running the program. Even if you don't have time to try all the solutions we've shown here, even just a few of them will make a difference to the performance of your PC and it's certainly better value than just buying a new PC.