RegSeeker screenshot download registry cleaners compared freeware

Computing : Windows

Registry Cleaners Compared


	There are dozens of different registry cleaners which can be downloaded off the web. Many make highly tempting claims to lure people to download them. Claims like being able to repair the registry, fix the registry, defrag the registry, speed up a computer, stop computer crashes, and so on. The truth is, registry cleaners cannot do any of those things. More about the dubious claims comes after the screenshot below. The program writers of genuine registry cleaners are well intentioned. Ultimately, though, the tools do not do any real good - but may do some harm. When a deep auto-clean is... continued in RH col.		carried out, with any registry cleaner, there is a risk it could leave a part of Windows, or the functioning of some application, broken. The odds against damage occurring are possibly small - but that is no consolation if it happens to you. And a search through online forums on registry cleaners reveals some terrible tales of woe. Having said that, we did find one cleaner had several features which made it stand out from all the rest. Not for being safer, or more thorough, or faster than the others, because it's not. But for, at least, being the most pleasant one to use.

Fig 1 (right)

When you open RegSeeker and, from the left-hand pane, choose 'Clean the Registry' (see the yellow number 1), the tool will scan your computer's registry files and present its findings in the right-hand pane. There are six such findings in this specimen screenshot, with the first one being on the three lines by the yellow number 2. The intelligent way in which each finding is wrapped over two or three rows, instead of in one long row scrolling off the right of the window, makes viewing the findings that much easier. This line wrapping feature, pioneered by RegSeeker, is exceptionally helpful yet is available in hardly any other registry cleaner. Equally excellent is that the nature of the problems found are conveniently colour-coded in red or green text, on a new row each time, so as to stand out, and all text is in a uniform and reasonable sized font. All very helpful features yet, again, available in hardly any other registry cleaner.

The first time you ever scan your registry with any cleaner, it will probably find and list several hundred orphaned entries. With RegSeeker, as with any other cleaner, you can elect to delete all the results in one heart-stopping, fingers-crossed go. But, with RegSeeker, you can play it safe, or safer, by deleting just a few selected results at a time, or just one selected result at a time (e.g. yellow number 3). In fact, if you right-click on a highlighted item like number 3, you get the menu 4. Then, if you choose the top option 5 (recommended), RegSeeker will open the Windows' Registry Editor and jump you directly to that particular result in the Registry, thereby allowing you to try to assess the implications of deleting that particular item in greater detail. That is another really smart feature which is available in RegSeeker but in hardly any other cleaner. When in doubt about deleting something, you can simply leave it be as RegSeeker allows you to hide (exclude) doubtful items from showing up in all future scans. This particular cleaner is full of these little user-friendly considerations in a way unmatched by any other cleaner.

Further Information


	1. RegSeeker's Features We found RegSeeker had several plus points which, whether taken separately or together, made RegSeeker stand out from all the other registry cleaners we have tried. In fact, of the many others sampled, not one had even half of these benefits. Some didn't even possess any of them. The said plus points are... i) No installation is required, hence RegSeeker does not put any stuff of its own in the registry. Most other cleaners have to be installed so they will put entries in the registry, some of which, ironically, will be left in there if you later ditch the tool. ii) Being freeware, there is no cost, no nags to register it or purchase it, and no restricted functions or time limitation. Shareware cleaners will nag you in some way, or time out, or both, if you don't pay. Nor is there any risk of it being a trappy bogus shareware or freeware cleaner like some others out there. iii) RegSeeker's window size is fully stretchable. Some other cleaners are limited to just a default window size, or to a default or maximised window size - nothing in between. iv) RegSeeker provides some handy registry tweaks to help make life that bit easier. They are found on the main menu under "Tweaks" (see 6th item down in the LH pane of the screenshot). They save having to install a separate registry utility like TweakUI just to obtain the same specific registry tweaks. Our favourite tweak is the "Rebuild icon cache" button. It's not something anyone needs very often but, when you do, what a gem. v) If you want to change RegSeeker's scan settings before carrying out a scan or a re-scan it allows you to do so. Some cleaners require you to close the tool down first and reopen it, which is frustrating, but not RegSeeker. vi) RegSeeker's scan results (see RH pane in the screenshot above) are, as we said earlier, in a uniform, reasonable sized font throughout. Most other cleaners use mixed font sizes and/or painfully small fonts. That makes them unpleasant utilities to work with in comparison. vii) RegSeeker uses colour to clarify the scan results, as can be seen in the screenshot. The majority of other registry cleaners just use black and white text for the scan results, which makes them extremely drab in comparison - increasingly so if their results are in one long line and/or in a miniscule font, as is usually the case. viii) Each separate scan finding is spread over three or four lines (see item 2 in the screengrab). This makes the information far easier to view and interpret. Most other cleaners string each result out in one, long, single line, often with bits disappearing behind column dividers or off the right-hand side of the screen. RegSeeker's layout style is unrivalled, even by the few other cleaners which do manage to use more than one line per result. ix) If any of RegSeeker's results are so lengthy that they still disappear off the right-hand side of even a maximised window, a bottom scrollbar will appear so you can still view an item in its entirety. Some other cleaners leave you guessing by not providing a horizontal scrollbar for that purpose. x) RegSeeker gives you a choice to delete items either singly, a few at a time, or all in one go. Deleting everything all in one, with any cleaner, the first time it is run, could be asking for trouble. But some cleaners give you no other choice. A few will even do that anyway - without any warning - which is hair-raising. Indeed, Web User mag (19.8.08) wisely wrote of registry tools "Only fix a few faults at a time and always make a backup so you can undo the changes if you find you have a problem afterwards." To that statement we would also add that (a) the so-called 'faults' found by any cleaner are never faults at all but just orphan entries which are both insignificant and harmless, (b) damage caused by a 'cleaned' registry can sometimes be a long time coming to light, especially if the damage affects just a single application, or a single feature in an application, which you might not get round to using for some time after running the 'fix-it' tool and, (c) how to back up the registry files is covered later, in detail, in the penultimate footnote on this page. xi) If you select a single scan result in RegSeeker and right-click on it, one of the menu choices is ' Open in Regedit' (see yellow number 5 in the screenshot). Choosing this option causes a Windows' utility called Registry Editor (Regedit for short) to open and, in its window, you will be jumped directly to the relevant orphan entry in the Registry. Most other cleaners either lack a direct link to Regedit or, if they do, they either will leave you dumped at the very top of the registry tree (meaning you have to drill your own way down each time, which is incredibly tedious) or, worse still (and most common), will jump you all the way down the tree to the same key that was previously visited with Regedit (leaving you at risk of unwittingly deleting the wrong item from within Regedit, which could be disastrous to the system). The real beauty of RegSeeker's slick association with Regedit is that it enables the user to do a far more thorough clean. That is because each orphan which any registry cleaner finds is only a single redundant line that, sometimes, is in a larger subkey of maybe three or four other lines all of which may well also be totally redundant. But, if you let a cleaner delete the single line, there is then no way the redundant subkey can ever be located again by the cleaner, so the redundant subkey and all its contents will, thereafter, stay in the registry, doing nothing, for ever more. RegSeeker, by conveniently allowing you to jump to and view the entire subkey for any scan result, is providing the user with a unique opportunity to decide if it would be safe and beneficial to delete more than just the one line. To take advantage of this, one does, of course, need to have some idea of what one is looking at when presented with data in Regedit. There, nearly a dozen plus points which, as we said earlier, not even half of which can be found in any one other cleaner and, in the case of the crudest, least obliging cleaners, not even one. After carrying out a full clean with any registry cleaner, it should be then be used to carry out a re-scan in case any new orphaned items have been created as a result of dependencies on the items deleted by the previous run. If further (new) items are found, the ensuing clean may pose an increased risk to your system. Though not if you have backed up the registry before commencing (see item 12). Some further notes about RegSeeker, and registry cleaners in general, now follow... 2. Installing RegSeeker RegSeeker is a standalone program. There is no install procedure, at least, not up to v1.55. So, unlike many other registry cleaners, this one will not put any additional entries in your registry. All you need to do is create a folder for its files in your C:\Program Files directory, then put a shortcut to its executable file in a Start menu style folder in the Start menu (relevant path will be something like C:\Documents and Settings\ All Users\ Start Menu\ Programs. To upgrade later, to a newer version, put its files in a new Start menu style folder with a slightly different name. To uninstall an obsolete version, just delete the old folder. 3. Can a registry cleaner repair the registry? No. A registry cleaner is programmed to find and delete unused entries in the registry. By merely deleting those dormant entries which are no longer or, in many cases, never were linking or pointing to anything else, this is obviously not going to fix anything. Indeed, if your computer is currently booting into Windows satisfactorily you can be fairly sure the registry is quite sound. This is because Windows checks the registry when booting up and, if it is corrupt, Windows will automatically prompt you to restart the computer, whereupon it will revert to a previous good registry. Windows stores copies of the registry from the last five successful bootups, and will choose one of those. On that basis, you can be confident, if Windows is booting up normally, the registry is hardly likely to be the direct cause of any problems you may be experiencing when subsequently using your computer, at least, not any problems which running a registry cleaner could fix. If, on the other hand, your PC refuses to boot into Windows, the registry could well be at fault. But, if you can't get into Windows you obviously won't be able to run the cleaner anyway, and, even if you could, it would never be any use for fixing that kind of problem. 4. Will cleaning the registry speed up my computer? That's another no. Think of the registry as being like a very long Excel spreadsheet, or a long WordPerfect table, with an immense number of rows in it - maybe 60,000 or more rows. When you run a registry cleaner, what it does is scan this long 'table' looking for any 'rows' containing data or instructions which refer to external files or controls which the cleaner thinks may no longer exist. These 'orphaned' entries might typically have occurred because they point to files which have been moved or deleted, or because programs have been uninstalled etc. Out of all those 60,000 rows, typically, only a paltry few hundred rows might have orphaned entries in them. Those entries, from those relatively few rows, form the results that will appear in a registry cleaner's window after it has scanned the registry files. When you tell the cleaner to delete those results, it erases the entries in each 'row' - but it does not delete the empty rows themselves. Hence the 'table' is still exactly as long after cleaning as it was before cleaning and, therefore, will still occupy the same amount of space on the hard disk. If, for instance, your registry files were occupying 5.6MB of disk space before a scan, they will still be occupying the same 5.6MB of space after the clean. There will have been no reduction in the occupied disk space. Consequently, a registry cleaner cannot revive a slow computer because the cleaning process does not reduce the size of the registry. Not convinced? Consider this then. A new computer will start life with a registry that is possibly only 4MB in size. As you install new programs, they will all insert their own fair share of new 'rows' in the registry, thereby increasing the length of the 'table'. Programs like Adobe Reader or Paint Shop Pro, by themselves, might insert thousands of new data rows. And they will not be the only ones to add major sprawl in the registry. In fact, in time, the registry will inevitably double, treble, or even quadruple in volume, leading to a possible registry size of 16MB, or more. However, this kind of growth is fully expected at the outset, and is absorbed without any discernible detriment in the speed of the computer. Therefore, if a computer has slowed down, it is almost certainly due to some other factor, not the orphaned entries in the registry. Performing a registry clean that merely empties the unused 'rows' will fail to claw back any disk space or reduce the file size, so will obviously not show any payback speedwise. 5. Will periodically running a registry cleaner help to prevent the registry from being damaged or corrupted? No. If anything, registry cleaners are more likely to cause rather than prevent damage. "If it ain't broke why try to fix it.", as the saying goes. 6. Can a registry cleaner defragment the registry files? No. A few registry utilities, not necessarily cleaners, claim to be able to "defragment" the registry - but they can't. In fact, Windows specifically protects the registry from being defragmented because it is such a volatile part of Windows, always in use, always changing. The registry is being accessed hundreds of times every second. So there is no point in even trying to defrag it because, even if you could, it would become highly fragmented again the very next time you start to do something on your computer. When registry utilities claim they will "defragment" the registry, it is an unfortunate misuse of the term. What they really mean is they will compact it, or pack it, and some tools, to their credit, do term it as such. Compacting is a process whereby the tool, through Windows, rebuilds the registry leaving out any empty 'rows' that are in the registry. However, the misuse of the word 'defragment' in respect of the registry has become so established that nothing can be done to reverse it now. Especially as some registry compactors have actually used the word 'defrag' in their names. Tools like "Free Registry Defrag" and "Auslogics Registry Defrag". These two tools are not even cleaners, their cont. in RH col.		Cont. from bottom of LH col... sole purpose is to compact the registry (e.g. after it has been cleaned by some other tool like RegSeeker or some programs have been uninstalled). For the record, the former of those two compactors received mixed User reviews at snapfiles.com in 2008. Three out of five reviewers were chuffed, but the other two ended up having to reformat their hard disks and reinstall Windows - one of them twice. So compacting carries an inherent risk in the same way that cleaning does. The message is clear - always back up the Registry afresh before running a compacting tool. RegSeeker, in common with most freebie cleaners, does not include a built-in compacting function. To manually compact the registry would, therefore, definitely require a separate utility. However, Windows is programmed to automatically compact (rebuild) the registry during bootup if the amount of empty 'rows' in it ever reaches 500KB, so it is not something one necessarily needs to worry about. 500KB is a significant proportion relative to the registry size so automatic compacting is obviously considered by Windows to be an infrequent, insignificant requirement. 7. Will compacting the registry speed up my computer? In theory yes. In practice no. Compacting the registry i.e. taking out the empty 'rows' left by a registry cleaner (or by uninstalling some software) will reduce the amount of space the registry files occupy on the hard disk. However, it will be reduced only by a very modest amount relatively. As a rough guide, you can anticipate the registry will shrink, after compacting, by about 1KB for every 'row' that was emptied by a registry cleaner. Hence, if a cleaner came up with, say, 600 removable items on the first-ever scan of your system, and you eventually removed all of them, the registry might go down by around 600KB following subsequent compacting. Hence, if a registry had been, say, 5.6MB in size before the scan, so was still the same 5.6MB after being cleaned, it might go down to 5MB after being compacted (or pro-rata for larger registries). A 10% reduction would normally sound like something well worth having but, where the registry is concerned, it is not that simple. You would not see a corresponding 10% improvement in the speed of Windows nor your applications. In fact, you would not notice any change at all - not even if you timed it with an atomic clock. That is because of the efficient way in which the registry is organised. You can think of it as being like several trees, each with a main trunk, several limbs, and many branches. All the data entries are hived away in the branches so that no time has to be wasted by Windows or your apps looking at the wrong trees or looking down branches that do not apply to them or have nothing in them. Furthermore, the erasure of a mere 600 rows, or whatever, from a total of maybe 60,000 rows or more, is just so small as to be totally insignificant. Hence, compacting the registry, whilst by no means a bad thing to do, will only result in very modest reductions in file size - and certainly no measurable gain in speed. A safe compactor is included in a program called WinRescue (which is otherwise a registry backup utility, not a registry cleaner). Its window has a scrolling status bar which reminds you what happened the last time its 'RegPack' feature was used. We're looking at it now, as we update this page, and it says "The last RegPack was done on 8/10/2009 and reduced the registry by 88KB. Since then, the registry has grown by xxKB." 88KB is nothing, not even half the size of the average Word document. So, compacting the registry is hardly worth the effort and risk. Easier and safer just to wait till Windows' automatic compactor kicks in, if it ever does, when the available gain reaches 500KB. 8. Which registry cleaner is the most thorough? Nobody knows which registry cleaner, if any, is the most efficient. If, for instance, you did a first-ever full clean with cleaner 'A', then scanned again with a different cleaner 'B', you can be sure B will find plenty of items missed by A. If you clean B's further items and then do another scan with cleaner 'C', you can be sure C will find yet more items that were missed by both A and B. You could be forgiven for thinking this means B is more efficient than A, and C is more efficient than both B and A. But that is not the case. If you had run the three cleaners in the reverse order i.e. C first, then B, and A last, the result would have been just the same i.e. with A this time being the one to find items missed by the other two. This is a notable enigma about registry cleaners. It occurs because each program's author is using slightly different search algorithms based on their own differing knowledge, preferences and safety reservations concerning registries. And this is further complicated by the fact that registries are forever fluid and the contents and orphans are never the same on any two machines. 9. Should I use more than one cleaner so as to remove more remnants? PC Advisor magazine (Aug 2007) wrote "There are a lot of Registry Cleaners but some can create more problems than they solve." PC Answers magazine (Sep 2007) wrote "We don't recommend any Registry Cleaners. Most, if not all, seem incapable of removing only genuinely redundant entries." Based on those kinds of warnings, it is self evident that running two different cleaners could double the risk to your system. But some people do chance running more than one cleaner and, for the most part, they will get away with it. In fact, we have run far more than just two cleaners during the course of our tests - though never without the reassurance of a full registry backup to return to when needed. And, be assured, we have needed it on quite a few occasions - including even when using RegSeeker. How to back up the registry is covered in item 12 below. 10. Missing-Files on Removable Drives One thing which all registry cleaners have trouble with is what to do about the multitude of registry entries that point to items on other partitions or on removable drives such as a floppy disk, CD, DVD, Zip or USB device, as these will invariably appear to a registry cleaner to be orphans, even if they're not, and even if the relevant disks and drives are in situ. Consequently, cleaners will always be wanting to list them as problems in the scan results. You can easily spot these items, if you care to, because they will be preceded by the appropriate (non-C:) drive letter such as A:\, D:\, E:\, F:\, G:\ , H:\, I:\ etc. If you use a cleaner's single-click auto-clean button, any such entries will be removed and that could cause you big trouble with some of your apps later on. For example, if you are a user of backup software, such as the popular Syncback, it is quite normal, unbeknown to you, for such tools to store all your backup job profiles in the registry. Some, maybe all of those profiles will be pointing to drives other than C: - so all your hours of hard work creating the job profiles could be wiped out simply by running the cleaner. One registry cleaner that fell into this risky category in our tests was Apex Free Registry Cleaner 1.0.0. RegSeeker used to be another but, following complaints from users, as of version 1.52, external items were ignored (i.e. no longer listed in the results). But that then meant you could no longer go through them one at a time to decide which removable-media items would actually be safe to delete (many often are). A cleaner with a different approach to this problem was Free Window Registry Repair 1.1. It included a tickable option to "Ignore Missing Files on Removable Drives", giving you the choice to hide them (i.e. stay safe) or see them (i.e. take a risk if deleting en block). But, whatever you do, do not ignore this particular issue as it is probably the biggest single cause of trouble occurring after running a registry cleaner for the very first time. 11. If a registry cleaner won't help to fix a poorly computer, what will? With this question, we are really talking about disaster recovery and that is a separate subject from Registry Cleaners as they cannot help with that. Suffice it to say that a computer which is misbehaving badly because of running a Registry Cleaner can always be rescued fully merely by restoring a backup copy of the registry that was made recently, at a time before the trouble began. It is also true to say that restoring a registry backup will fix most miscellaneous Windows problems of a non-malicious nature. Not always, but nearly always. So restoring rather than cleaning the registry is the appropriate first step to take when trying to mend Windows. See item 12 next for more info. 12. How to back up the registry Windows consists of thousands of different interacting files. It is a very complex, volatile setup. In fact, it is a miracle of gradual technical evolution that computers work at all. So, it's hardly surprising that, sooner or later, some corruption is going to occur somewhere or other in amongst all those files. When it does, Windows will start misbehaving and, in really serious cases, will fall over altogether. When trouble does occur, the cause will be in one of only two possible places - so recovering from the trouble, no matter how serious, is never more than a one or two-stage process. The occurring trouble will be either (i) in the registry files (which is very simple to fix if you have a backup) or (ii) in both the registry files and other system areas (which is also simple enough to fix, but requires more preparation). We do not intend to deal with the second scenario here (it involves restoring a backup image of the C: drive which was made with a drive-imaging tool at a time before the trouble began). The first scenario is all that needs to be considered in order to be able to cure any kind of trouble which might be caused inadvertently through running a registry cleaner or a registry compactor, which is all this article relates to. The Registry consists of just a handful of files - so it is only a small task to back up the entire registry before running a registry cleaner. Other good times for having a backup of a good registry to fall back on is (i) before installing a new program (ii) before running anti-spyware or malware scanners as they seriously edit the registry or (iii) before editing the registry manually. If registry-related trouble ever occurs as a result of any of those operations, restoring the registry backup is all it would take to put things back the way they were. To make it easy to back up the registry, as often as you wish to, and to restore any recent backup whenever you need to or want to, there is a wonderful, long-established lifesaver utility called WinRescue. It is inexpensive shareware and covers all versions of Windows from Windows 95 to Vista. Or, if you use XP or Vista, there is ERUNT. That one is free and simpler. WinRescue is more sophisticated and also happens to include a compacting feature, called RegPack, so a separate registry utility is not then required for that purpose. Neither of the tools are registry cleaners. If you have one or other of the above two backup tools, spend an hour learning and practising with the tool before finally making your first retained backup of the registry. After that, you will be able to run registry cleaners or compactors, or edit the registry manually, as often as you like, without a single moment's concern. That is because, if trouble results, with just a few clicks and only a few minutes, you will have been able to restore the latest good registry backup you made. Even if Windows will only boot as far as a blank black or blue screen because of registry damage, you will still be able to restore the registry and return to normal if you have also created an emergency bootable floppy or CD, as per the guidelines which accompany the said backup tools. 13. Conclusion If you cannot resist trying a registry cleaner, despite our cautionary notes, then, of the many we have looked at over the years, we are in no doubt that RegSeeker is the nicest and best-featured one to use (as detailed in section 1). We are not, however, saying RegSeeker is any less risky or faster or more thorough than any other cleaner, only that it is, at least, a pleasant one to have to stare at, whereas most others certainly aren't. It should always be remembered that 'cleaning' the registry with any cleaner is a severe form of editing the registry, so damage could well occur during the cleaning process, particularly the first time a cleaner is run if allowed to remove all orphans en bloc. But it is possible to protect yourself from the said risks. For help on that, see section 12.