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Possible Duplicate:
Is it worth cleaning the registry?

Hi, I’m constantly seeing Ad’s about Registry Cleaning. Each time I see one of those Ad’s I remember reading an article (don’t remember who wrote it, but it was posted on one of those geek chat pages) a few years ago about it not being necessary to clean a registry, in fact, the article continued, it and said sometimes it causes more harm than good to run a registry cleaner.

I would like to hear your opinion about this, and if you think it is good to use one of these programs, could you recommend a few. Thanks in advance. garybo

Community
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garybo
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2 Answers2

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Recommend a few - the famous one is CCleaner.

As for required, I firmly believe the answer is no.

There was a recent question about computers and speed where this came up. You can read my answers and some of the others there. It should give you a bit of background on this subject.

Link.

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William Hilsum
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Since almost all core Windows programs, and many third-party apps use the registry, if the registry is full of unused keys, it follows that registry access is slower.

That being said, for it to make a real difference in performance, you'd likely have to delete thousands of keys. Wil has mentioned CCleaner, and every time I've run that, the most keys I've seen it delete is about 400.

I'd say the only situations a registry cleaning are really warranted is if you are preparing the machine for or transferring it to a new user, as a registry cleaning deletes many MRU lists that hold recently accessed items and such.

LawrenceC
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