My Ad-aware update told me I should click on a button and get a free install and cleaning from “Advanced Registry Cleaner,” v 5.0. Sounds great.
I downloaded the program, but after I was told that I had 532 ‘errors,’ the program said it would clean up 10 errors for free, (.0187969%!), but I’d have to pony up $26.99 for the rest of the errors, and that the cleaner subscription was good for a year. (I couldn’t even get a price for the program until after I delivered my email address, which I declined to do. Instead I tracked down the price on the ARC homepage.)
Not quite ‘bate and switch,’ but close enough for me. I resent the slight of hand.
CCleaner is the best one to come out in a long time and it is free. I was impressed even as an IT professional and a long-term user of these types of apps.
Yeah, I’ll second CCleaner. Be aware that even the best registry cleaner can screw you. Backup important data first (always a good idea) and don’t forget stuff like backing up your bookmarks.
If you have a system for a long time, the registry gets filled with all kinds of crap. The registry is at the very heart of Windows and it is like a big database that it references for core operations. It can contain errors and duplicate entries that bog the whole thing down. I have poked through registries by hand long enough to attest to how bloated and corrupted they can get. CCleaner sped up my computer noticeably even though I have used supposedly similar apps with far more little results.
Contrasting opinion: Registry cleaners are mostly snake oil. A quality one in fact does what it claims to do, namely remove obsolete or redundant entries. But does that affect Windows’ performance or stabiilty? Nope, or at least so marginally as to be irrelevant for almost all users in almost all circumstances.
Rewind back to the speeds & capacity limits of Windows 95 and registry cleaners had a role. Just like screen savers did on CGA & EGA monitors. But today? Nope.
If you are a person who clicks every “Get A Free Thing” link on every page you visit, gets malware problems frequently , and/or you’re perpetually installing & uninstalling new software, … well you may well be a candidate where a registry cleaner (used only AFTER a malware remover) does some good.
But for Joe/Jane Average that uses the same 15 programs that came with the PC until it gets old, registry cleaning is vastly overrated.
The downside is that a registry cleaner can, far more than a disk defragger, uttlery destroy your Windows installation, such that removing the hard drive to another PC is the safest / easiest way to recover your data.
To my professional (sofware dev manager) eye, registry cleaners do not have benefit / risk ratios that make sense unless you’re PC is really fouled up. And if it’s that fouled up, a Windows reinstall & repatch, followed by improved hygiene habits, is a vastly better way to go.
And that is exactly why I cast a wary eye on the idea of these things. It’s like the drugs they advertise whose side effects include cancer! If the caveats are that scary, then do we really need this ‘remedy’?