Registry cleaner

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A registry cleaner is a type of program for Microsoft Windows operating system designed to remove redundant or unwanted items from the Windows registry. The value of registry cleaners is a debated topic with some people believing there are problems with the concept of a registry cleaner, while other people highly recommend them.

1 The "problem"
2 Advantages
3 Disadvantages
- 3.1 Registry damage
  - 3.1.1 Malware threat
- 3.2 Marginal performance benefit
4 References

[edit] The "problem"

Some uninstallers for Windows software do not completely remove all traces of the software from the registry. It is possible that these traces may interfere with performance or have other negative impacts.^{[citation needed]} Using a registry cleaner is a way to get rid of these bits. The registry cleaner scans the registry, and picks out the unnecessary and/or damaged pieces and deletes/repairs them.

[edit] Advantages

Registry cleaners, or registry cleanup software, can in some cases improve the performance of computers by ridding the registry of redundant information.

Due to the sheer size and complexity of the registry database, manually cleaning up debris and invalid entries would be impractical, so registry cleaners are essentially tools that automate the process of looking for invalid entries, missing file references or broken links within the registry and resolving them.

Some registry cleaners offer backup and restore functions that allow the user to revert changes made by the registry cleaner in case they are undesired.

[edit] Disadvantages

[edit] Registry damage

Most notably, critics say there is no reliable way for a third party program to know whether any particular key is invalid, redundant or neither. Windows is closed source, so poorly designed registry cleaners may not know for sure whether a key is still being used by Windows or what detrimental effects removing it may have. This has lead to examples of registry cleaners causing loss of functionality and/or system instability.^[1]^[2]^[3]

[edit] Malware threat

The alleged benefits of Registry cleaners have been used by a number of trojans applications to install malware, typically through social engineering attacks that use website popups.^[4] These rogue registry cleaners often exaggerate the problems on a PC and are often marketed with advertisements that falsely claim to have pre-analyzed your PC with warnings such as "Performance Scan Results: Bad. Click here to fix."^[5]

[edit] Marginal performance benefit

On Windows 9x computers, it is possible that a very large registry could slow down the computer's startup time. However this is far less of an issue with NT-based Operating Systems (including Windows XP and Vista) due to a different on-disk structure of the registry, improved memory management and indexing.^[6] Slowdown due to registry bloat is thus far less of an issue in modern versions of Windows. More importantly, however, the difference in speed due to the use of a registry cleaner is negligible: rarely do they remove more than a few kilobytes from the total size of the registry. In fact, technology journalist Ed Bott has claimed that no-one has ever successfully managed to measure any significant performance increase from the use of a registry cleaner.^[7] Any potential user of a registry cleaner must thus balance a probably negligible performance increase against the possibility of system instability improvments. Lastly, Microsoft does not advocate the use of these tools through its support website.