Is Registry Clean Up Worth A Try?

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paddington
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Is Registry Clean Up Worth A Try?

Post by paddington »

Are you currently experiencing spam?
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gameoverman
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Re: Is Registry Clean Up Worth A Try?

Post by gameoverman »

In the past I tried using registry cleaners. It never did anything for me, but I also never experienced a cleaner damaging my Windows install. If I was having a genuine problem with the registry, a clean Windows reinstall was the fix. I next tried learning how to perform the registry fixes myself. Once again I suffered no ill effects but found no measurable improvement. It always came down to either you don't really have a problem and the registry 'fix' is a placebo or you have a problem and should just reinstall Windows. I also learned that, for me, a reinstall of Windows once every couple of years DID result in a noticeably. and measurably, faster computer. But then I install and uninstall things on a regular basis, so not everyone will experience the same level of Windows bloat.
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Anonymous Bosch
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Re: Is Registry Clean Up Worth A Try?

Post by Anonymous Bosch »

gameoverman wrote: Sun Sep 27, 2020 2:39 pm In the past I tried using registry cleaners. It never did anything for me, but I also never experienced a cleaner damaging my Windows install. If I was having a genuine problem with the registry, a clean Windows reinstall was the fix. I next tried learning how to perform the registry fixes myself. Once again I suffered no ill effects but found no measurable improvement. It always came down to either you don't really have a problem and the registry 'fix' is a placebo or you have a problem and should just reinstall Windows. I also learned that, for me, a reinstall of Windows once every couple of years DID result in a noticeably. and measurably, faster computer. But then I install and uninstall things on a regular basis, so not everyone will experience the same level of Windows bloat.
FWIW, I strongly suspect you're responding to a spammer.
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Daehawk
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Re: Is Registry Clean Up Worth A Try?

Post by Daehawk »

Its clearly a spam bot. But as for a cleaner I use CCleaner's registry cleaner. I usually run it after Ive installed and deleted some games.
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Blackhawk
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Re: Is Registry Clean Up Worth A Try?

Post by Blackhawk »

Daehawk wrote: Sun Sep 27, 2020 3:27 pm Its clearly a spam bot. But as for a cleaner I use CCleaner's registry cleaner. I usually run it after Ive installed and deleted some games.
To possibly redeem a spambot thread, be careful. CCleaner has been hacked multiple times, it has been found monitoring users, and if you start reading up on it, there have been all sorts of suspicious elments associated with it. It's owned by Avast which is a company known for shady practices, including harvesting and selling user data.

For cleaning junk files, I switched to BleachBit. For registry cleaning, I realized that it isn't 1999 anymore and that it doesn't really do anything for a modern PC.
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gilraen
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Re: Is Registry Clean Up Worth A Try?

Post by gilraen »

Blackhawk wrote: Sun Sep 27, 2020 4:17 pm For registry cleaning, I realized that it isn't 1999 anymore and that it doesn't really do anything for a modern PC.
I still use a registry cleaner if I have some software that got all messed up, and I want to clean it out as much as possible before attempting a clean reinstall.
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Carpet_pissr
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Re: Is Registry Clean Up Worth A Try?

Post by Carpet_pissr »

Yeah, I think CCleaner USED to be good, but I don't doubt it's been sold multiple times over the years to whoever wants to pay the most for their dbase of registrants' data.

That happens a lot more than I used to think....great piece of software gets put out into the wild, and maybe is around for years, but then it's sold to a spammer and it's very difficult to tell when that happens.
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hitbyambulance
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Re: Is Registry Clean Up Worth A Try?

Post by hitbyambulance »

a registry cleaner is actually useful at my job - there's one software i use that is constantly being updated and it necessitates uninstalling and installing a new developer build at least once per week. sometimes there is an actual problem with how it handles the registry, and i used to install the new build directly over the old and the application would refuse to work correctly. in cases like this, the regcleaner would be a last resort fix, if my manual editing of the registry refused to work as it should.
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Kasey Chang
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Re: Is Registry Clean Up Worth A Try?

Post by Kasey Chang »

I use the one in the free GlarySoft Utilities.
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LordMortis
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Re: Is Registry Clean Up Worth A Try?

Post by LordMortis »

Blackhawk wrote: Sun Sep 27, 2020 4:17 pm
Daehawk wrote: Sun Sep 27, 2020 3:27 pm Its clearly a spam bot. But as for a cleaner I use CCleaner's registry cleaner. I usually run it after Ive installed and deleted some games.
To possibly redeem a spambot thread, be careful. CCleaner has been hacked multiple times, it has been found monitoring users, and if you start reading up on it, there have been all sorts of suspicious elments associated with it. It's owned by Avast which is a company known for shady practices, including harvesting and selling user data.

For cleaning junk files, I switched to BleachBit. For registry cleaning, I realized that it isn't 1999 anymore and that it doesn't really do anything for a modern PC.
+1. I used to use it on occasion until my company, rightfully, put it on the banned software list.

Cleaning a registry can help but I don't have a viable modern alternative to ccleaner, so I don't. I could have used one just last week, when an installer borked and having borked it borked any sense of re-install and windows would not revert to a previous state (happens a lot in 10 and is much more dangerous than it was in 7 for my money. I don't know why). It took about 20 hours of work with vendor support at a major software company before we escalated in to someone who did a manual install of sorts to bypass the windows installer service. I'm not sure if we'd have been better off with going to straight F&R (Format and reload)
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Blackhawk
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Re: Is Registry Clean Up Worth A Try?

Post by Blackhawk »

Cleaning registry entries for troubleshooting a specific problem is a different creature than scraping the whole thing down to the bone and hoping that something doesn't get misidentified. If that happens and you're lucky, you'll just crash on startup until you fix it. If you're unlucky you'll become unstable and spend weeks trying to figure out why A, C, and W don't work right anymore, and S, T, and X don't work if Y is running.
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LordMortis
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Re: Is Registry Clean Up Worth A Try?

Post by LordMortis »

I always looked at what was being cleaned to look for and what are you thinking by "cleaning" that? and if it all went south I'd have a backup to revert to... Though I must admit I never had it all go south on me, so I may have been sorely disappointed if it did and reverting the to old registry entry didn't put me back at square one.

I'm even more cautious with registry work since Window changed revisions in the 16.. version. Cortana kept intruding in everything so I googled a regedit to gimp her. It worked great until the second half of 16.. revision happened and my home machine crashed irrevocably. Fortunately, that valuable lesson was learned on my home machine.
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Carpet_pissr
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Re: Is Registry Clean Up Worth A Try?

Post by Carpet_pissr »

So.....I should delete CCleaner?
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Punisher
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Re: Is Registry Clean Up Worth A Try?

Post by Punisher »

For general cleaning, I use UVK Portable. It does a pretty good job cleaning out temp stuff and has a whole bunch of other tools. They also have (maybe had, it's been a while) a $35 lifetime technician license (which includes lifetime updates) so that I can legally use it when cleaning out and repairing computers for work.
I have used Ccleaner's registry cleaner to help speed up PC's (It generally works or does nothing. Since it first came out, I've had it kill maybe 10 Windows computers out of many 1000's and none in the past 5+ years at a minimum.) I also use it for troubleshooting at times as well. Then it gets uninstalled.
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