What Is The Best Registry Cleaner?

The Windows Registry is simply a ever-growing database that lives in every Microsoft Windows system that stores all the settings, options, preferences, and hardware options of the user. The registry continues to grow each time you start Windows. Whenever your computer starts, Windows first notifies the registry to let all installed application know the settings, documents, program paths, and a bunch of other stuff. The registry gradually gets bloated unecessary stuff this way, and this slowly leads to a degradation in the computer’s speed.

Whenever you put a new program on your computer and then uninstall that program, remnants of it will remain in the registry record also.

Here’s where it gets tricky — After you have instituted changes to the registry, you can’t undo it without specialized software (or manual editing).

Doing a manual edit of your registry is a nightmare and is not something an amateur should attempt. Rule of thumb: the most desireable registry is always an unmolested registry.

Ever since Windows 95, most if not all software applications will intentionally leave behind entries in Windows registry to preserve licensing information, that are not deleted when the program is uninstalled. This left over junk continues to build up until a registry cleaner application is employed to get clean it out.

Also, some software crashes will help screw up your registry.

What to look for in an excellent registry cleaner

Registry cleaning programs are designed to scan the registry, identify, and delete any no longer needed entries it holds. But that’s the ideal situation. The reality is, there isn’t a perfect registry cleaner. All registry cleaners have complex formulas which help them “identify” which is a vital key and what is junk. There is no method of knowing if removing a registry entry will impact computer performance in subtle ways. Therefore, any good registry cleaner needs to allow the user to backup your registry before you begin repairing the registry.

Here is a manual way of backing-up your registry nice and easy:

Click Start - Run
Type: regedit (which opens up the registry editor window)
From the box, hit File - Export
Save it with a name you can remember, preferably including the date

If you observe, there are really four kinds of registry cleaners:

Deep scan registry cleaners
Light scan registry cleaners
Balanced scanning registry cleaners
Virus infected registry cleaners

A deep cleaner can be dangerous to your system since it might remove some important registry keys by being overzealous. A light scanning program, isn’t much use either; it merely scans the surface. A fake registry cleaner is dangerous, because it is spyware cloaked as a registry cleaner. Don’t download anything just because it’s free!

The “best” registry cleaner is one that:

Defragments your registry
Allows a backup of the registry
Asks whether you want to delete a certain entry and offers solutions
Perform other functions BESIDES registry work

Rather than just putting up with the slow speed of your system and the never-ending system failures, you can actually do something about it.  Be smart and get yourself a good registry cleaner.  It will help your computer run as smoothly and efficiently as the day you first brought it home.

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