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1. RegSeeker Features
We found RegSeeker 1.52 (1.55 for Vista) had several plus points which, whether taken separately or together, made RegSeeker stand out from the rest. Of the many other cleaners we have tried, not one had even half of these benefits. Some didn't possess any of them. The 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 stuff in the registry, some of which, ironically, will be left in there if you later get rid of 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.
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 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.
vi) RegSeeker's scan results (see RH pane in the screenshot) are, as we said earlier, in a uniform, reasonable sized font throughout. Most other cleaners use mixed font sizes and/or unreasonably small fonts, which 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 - particularly if also in one long line or in a miniscule font.
viii) Each separate scan result is spread over three or four lines (see item 2 in the screengrab). This makes the info 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
manage to use more than one line per result.
ix) If any of RegSeeker's results are so lengthy that they disappear off the right hand side of the 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, we would add that (a) so-called registry
'faults' are not faults at all but just insignificant excess baggage and (b) damage
can sometimes be a long time coming to light, especially if the damage affects just a single
application which you might not get round to re-using for some time after running the 'fix-it' tool
and (c) we cover how to back up the registry files 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 item 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 will either 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), 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, which could be disastrous). 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 no way the redundant subkey can ever be located again by the cleaner, so the useless subkey and all its contents will 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 a user with a unique opportunity to decide if it would be safe and beneficial to delete more than just the one line. Of course, to do this, one needs to have some idea what one is looking at when presented with a scan finding in Regedit. But, as far as we are concerned, anybody who is not already aux fait with Regedit and/or does not know how to back up the registry before running a cleaner, or editing the registry, would probably be safer leaving registry cleaners well alone until they know a little bit more.
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 least obliging cleaners, not one even.
After carrying out a full clean with any registry cleaner, it should 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 will possibly be a time of increased risk to your system. Though not if you 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 to v1.52) so, unlike most other registry cleaners, this one will not put any stuff of its own 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 on your Start menu. To upgrade later, to a newer version, put the new files in a new folder. To uninstall an obsolete version, just delete its 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 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 are experiencing when subsequently using your computer. On the other hand, if your PC refuses to boot into Windows, and assuming you have not been hacked nor infected by a virus, the trouble could well be due to a corrupt registry. 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 files and the like 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 not prevent damage. "If it ain't broke don't 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 (always changing, always in use) part of Windows.
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 a 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. Cont.
in RH col. |
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Cont. from bottom of LH col...
Unfortunately, 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 utilities have actually used the word 'defrag' in their names. Like the misnomered duo "Free Registry Defrag" and "Auslogics Registry Defrag". These two tools are not cleaners, their purpose is only to compact the registry (i.e. after it's been cleaned by some other tool like RegSeeker). For the record, the former of those two compactors received mixed User reviews at snapfiles.com. 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 - back up the registry files not only before cleaning but also before compacting!
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 reaches 500KB, so it is not something one necessarily needs to worry about. Note that 500KB is a significant proportion relative to the registry so automatic compacting would be an infrequent occurrence.
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 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's just 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, boughs 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 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.
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 depending 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 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 if need be. And, be assured, we
have needed it on quite a few occasions - including even with RegSeeker! Backing 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 drive, 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:\, B:\, 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, like the popular Syncback,
it is quite normal, unbeknown to you, for the tools to store all your backup job profiles in the registry. Some,
maybe all of those profiles should 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 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 risk 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 fair 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 a good registry is definitely a worthwhile 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's a miracle of 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 occurs, 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) or (ii) in both the registry files and other system areas (which is also simple enough to fix, it just needs more preparation).
We do not intend to deal with the second scenario here (it involves restoring a drive-image
backup of the C: drive that was made 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
inadvertently result from running a registry cleaner or registry compactor, which is what this
page relates to.
The Registry consists of only a small 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 before installing a new program, before running
anti-malware scanners (e.g. Spybot, Ad-Aware etc) as they seriously edit the registry, or 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 with versions for all
manifestations of Windows from Win95 to Vista. Or, if you've got
XP or Vista, you can make do with 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.
If you've already got one or other of the above two backup tools, or are now deciding to get
one, spend an hour learning, then practising with, the tool. 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, then, with just
a few clicks and only a few minutes, you will have been able to restore the last good registry
backup you made. Even if Windows will only boot as far as a blank black screen because
of registry damage, you will still be able to restore the registry and return to normal if you
create an emergency bootable floppy or CD as per the guidelines which accompany the backup tool.
Provided you learn the tool properly, and use it purposefully, there will come a day when you
will bless the day you did so.
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 one to use and is the best-featured (see section 1).
We are not saying RegSeeker is safer, faster or more thorough than other cleaners, merely that
it is the most pleasant to use. Cleaning the registry is a severe form of editing the
registry so damage might occur during the process. Indeed, RegSeeker carries warnings
to that effect. But you can, and should, protect yourself from the risk before using any
cleaner (see section 12). |
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Fig
1 (right)