Feature Article

An Alternative View Of Registry Repair Utilities

Many in the computer industry maintain that cleaning the Microsoft Windows operating system registry is virtually unnecessary. That, contrary to marketing hype by registry repair software companies, there is no need to "clean" the registry because it has little to do with computing speed slowdowns and therefore it is not something with which the general user need be concerned.  

Just to review, the registry contains all the operating system's knowledge of a computer's configuration, hardware devices, installed software, user settings, and location of device drivers. Under normal conditions, many computer experts do not recommend people use registry cleaners. Modifying registry keys incorrectly can cause Windows instability, or make Windows unbootable.

They say that no registry cleaner is completely safe, and the potential is always present to cause more problems than the cleaners claim to fix. Another point they make is that Windows is a closed source system, and developers of registry cleaners are not working on definite information, but rather empirical observation. Registry repair cleaners will usually have to do some guesswork and hope they don't remove something important.

They recommend that if you do have a problem which is rooted in the registry, it would be better to edit only the specific keys and/or values that are causing the problem. And always backup the registry first before proceeding with any edits.

Manually changing one registry entry is less likely to produce any unfortunate circumstance of allowing an automated product to make multiple changes simultaneously. If you don't have knowledge of the registry, you would be better off leaving it alone, and definitely not placing your trust in a program to do the job for you.

When one computer expert, Mark Russinovich, author of Windows Internals, and co-founder of Winternals and Sysinternals, both companies of which have been bought by Microsoft, was asked if he thought that registry entries left by uninstalled programs could severely slow down a computer, he had the following to say:

"No, even if the registry was massively bloated there would be little impact on the performance of anything other than exhaustive searches [of the registry itself].

"On Win2000 terminal server systems, however, there is a limit on the total amount of Registry data that can be loaded and so large profile hives can limit the number of users that can be logged on simultaneously.

"I haven't and never will implement a registry cleaner since it is of little practical use on anything other than Win2000 terminal servers. Developing one that's both safe and effective requires a huge amount of application-specific knowledge."

So, according to these experts, what should a person do about the registry?

The best thing you can do is to enable System Restore and add to your Autostart applications a registry backup. They strongly recommended the ERUNT freeware program for this:

[ERUNT] Registry Backup and Restore for Windows
http://www.larshederer.homepage.t-online.de/erunt/

[ERUNT Download URLs]
http://www.aumha.org/downloads/erunt.zip
http://www.aumha.org/downloads/erunt-setup.exe