Registry Cleaner App?

hdmi said:

Neither one of both these two different methods can be considered reliable. Even though 'reasonable' is still only a subjective term, you'd have to create an image of the Windows partition to be able to call it reasonably safe.

Exactly. There are enough things that can break the system, which immediately helps to explain why avoiding to add more things that can break the system when there really is no need to add them makes all the perfect sense in the world. You could always decide to use Process Monitor to try and pinpoint what's causing the registry hives to become bloated. But if they're not bloated, the expression "much ado about nothing" springs to mind. Windows 11 version 24H2 runs better if it's dirty. Cleaning sickness causes it to poop on itself. You know. Stuff like that.

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There is no such thing as foolproof. You can create a infinite images but as the saying goes, life has no guarantees other than death and taxes which are both certain and guaranteed. Anything else depends more on your own fate. Same reason I have not made personal webpages since 1996 or so as everytime I make one, something bad always happen to it including the backups which is automated as these were on Unix servers that were backed up. One of the owners pissed off some hackers and basically they killed the entire Seagate Elite 8GB HDD by making it spin in reverse and it's been through like 20 data recovery houses and all of them saw all the physical damage on the discs themselves. At the end, Seagate replaced the drive with a new one but the data was gone. Data Recovery houses claims the recovery rate was 94%, so we were part of the 6% being unsuccessful.

It depends how long you had the system and when the original registry is created so Process Monitor may or may not be needed since if your system originated since Windows 95 and basically you went through 95, 98, 98SE, ME, 2000, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10 and 11, it can add up as I never clean install and I always just clone the HDD when upgrading the hardware. So it depends what one defines or considers as bloated and how much software is actually installed since if you have a large amount, you wouldn't be able to fix it if the registry really needed that size for all the installed software.

If it isn't bloated, then obviously, there is no point of cleaning it or compacting even periodically. Windows 11 24H2 seems to break for lots of people on both new and old systems when you read the threads. My only experience with 24H2 and that's the latest preview version back in September 2024 was the Acer I bought to fix my current system and then returned within the 30 day period in person for 100% money back was a system that shipped with Windows 11 Home, not sure what build it was but since it was not my system and they don't check other than for scratches and it won't be resold anyways, I upgraded it to 24H2 and it worked without any issues. The only thing I did was I accidentally after putting it on 24H2, to not save one of the Power Management Profiles it shipped with but that wasn't a real problem since I did a system reset before I returned it. So I guess frequently bloated and being bloated from a long term are two different things. The first one, you can probably use Process Monitor to figure it out but the other one is similar to wear and tear of something over a longer period of time which will be way harder to figure out. I'm on the Beta Insiders channel for my only system currently which is still 23H2 so there is no 24H2 option on Beta yet. I also run Canary on the same system under Hyper-V but don't have anything installed on it.

In the end, there is always benefits vs risks for everything. It's no different than some people cleaning their browser history multiple times a day but one bad thing might be what if they couldn't remember what site they found something on since remember it's not part of the backup either, and searches do not always show the same results. So with any situation, there will always be the good side and the bad side. It should be a personal choice which others should respect as why would someone really care what one does or does not do when the system is not theirs in the first place.

antspants said:

Please list your preferences from 1 to -10


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That's it? Linux has way more distribution than there are flavors at Baskin-Robbins ice cream, as the saying from the 1990s goes.

What's funny is the author for Slackware actually tells people to they would run FreeBSD as it was known for being the most stable without rebooting required when FreeBSD was sponsored by Walnut Creek CD ROM when wcarchive.cdrom.com aka ftp.cdrom.com was the busiest site on the internet which also hosted Slackware.

and then there's Microsoft in 1975:

Someone seems a little touchy today.

Almighty1 said:

Since we are talking about the registry, we have to leave out applications and hardware.

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A bloated or corrupted registry can cause the kind of system instability that manifests in various ways including software glitches, which, in turn, can degrade the registry further. Additionally, hardware is controlled by the OS, drivers, software applications, settings, other hardware, user interactions etc. so, even if we can assume that the hardware itself isn't actually faulty, system instability can still manifest in such a way that causes some or all of the hardware to behave erratically. Which, in turn, can degrade system stability further. In short, the registry is only one part of the system. What starts with a problem in one part can trigger a cascade of problematic events and symptoms that can stay hidden to the user for unpredictable periods of time. They can remain unknown until these problems are revealed. This leaves plenty of opportunity for cascaded effects to manifest in ways that will break things in some other part(s) and/or will unwantedly affect the behavior thereof.

Almighty1 said:

And noticed the common causes does say Bloated registry.

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That's why I earlier explained how it is possible to check if a registry hive is bloated. But there's a difference between 1/ compressing a bloated hive so as to debloat it and 2/ removing data from the registry with the kind of registry cleaners that, contrary to popular belief, add the potential risk of causing system instability.

Almighty1 said:

Obviously, corrupted anything, not just the registry can have issues. If the registry is smaller, there is less things to corrupt and if the registry is larger, there is larger amount of things in the registry that can get corrupted.

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The more items are added to the registry as a result of frequent installing/uninstalling software, the more registry items can be cleaned up by using a registry cleaner. Then when you agree to let this registry cleaner clean up all these numerous extra items, the end result will be an even bigger risk of getting yourself in trouble. That's just because the more registry items are removed with a registry cleaner, the higher the chance of removing an item that it shouldn't remove.

Almighty1 said:

But since everyone's argument was the system won't boot so either it boots or it doesn't, there is no such thing as instability since it's like saying you delete a registry key, the system BSODs two hours later after fully loaded. It could be something else since you have to first know it was the registry that caused it as even what you posted above means there can be lots of variables that can cause instability, and it never said anything about registry cleaning as a cause for instability.

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The simple fact that it could be something else is just another good reason why you want to avoid messing around with it. If you don't use a registry cleaner and your system becomes unstable, at least you'll know that using a registry cleaner is not what's caused that instability.

If I was going to use a registry cleaner at all it would be Revo Registry Cleaner. It has a portable version. revo-registry-cleaner-free - en

By the way, one can use Revo Registry Cleaner to scan for specific entries eg: Adobe

hdmi said:

That article doesn't say anything about registry cleaners.

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No, but MS said that a bloated registry can cause performance issues. That was my point. I conclude that 'cleaning ' the registry can improve performance AND reliability.

Tweaking.com has a registry compressor that is fast and free. My installation is fresh and my hives are all small.

The whole registry is under 150MB (including SAM) and SOFTWARE is only 80MB. (File EXplorer reports it as 328MB on disk)

Just a quick aside for those quoting Copilot and Google AI

You realize that all these AI apps do is scour the web for info, collate the data, and put it into a presentable format. They do not know (or care about) the validity of the info. There are certainly algorithms built in to give added weight to those data that are most prevalent, but if you post "the sky is red" a million times on the web and then ask an AI app what color the sky is, what do you think the response will be?

As I said, just an aside - not an attack on anyone or any specific posts.

Yes, we all realise this! ChatGPT will cte its souces and I check these.

@allan Of course. Copilot results are thoroughly footnoted and the footnotes are clickable to check validity. I use Copilot because I get good reliable summaries and I don't have to wade though myriads of Google ads to get what I want.

kelper said:

No, but MS said that a bloated registry can cause performance issues. That was my point. I conclude that 'cleaning ' the registry can improve performance AND reliability.

Tweaking.com has a registry compressor that is fast and free. My installation is fresh and my hives are all small.

The whole registry is under 150MB (including SAM) and SOFTWARE is only 80MB. (File EXplorer reports it as 328MB on disk)

Registry Compressor

Optimize your registry with Tweaking.com Registry Compressor! Reduce registry size and enhance system performance with this tool.

www.tweaking.com

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I conclude something else. I conclude that, while it is true that 'cleaning' the registry CAN improve performance and reliability, in the vast majority of cases it doesn't improve performance in any way that can be noticed AND adds the potential risk of removing specific items from the registry that should not be removed if preventing reliability from being degraded is what you're after (and contrary to popular belief). That plus the fact that the Microsoft article you linked explains how it is possible to compress a bloated registry hive to remedy performance degradations that can result from having a bloated registry hive, and remedy them in such a way that lets you effectively avoid adding that potential risk. In other words, the article doesn't say anything about registry cleaners simply because registry cleaners are typically a bad idea. That is, in spite of the fact that I am definitely NOT the kind of guy who blindly believes everything Dave Plummer says or believes everything Microsoft says.

Rather, my conclusion re removing registry items that should not be removed comes from 39.5 years of hands-on experience with tweaking Microsoft software products. It goes back to things like re-purposing part of the code of the MSX BASIC ROM (Copyright 1983 by Microsoft) after copying that specific part of it into RAM as a high school kid in the mid 1980s that enabled me to develop my own DTP (desktop publishing) solution. That I was using in conjunction with a graphics design tool that I also wrote myself, in assembly language on the Zilog Z80 CPU. To make and print homework assignment chemistry reports with all sorts of chemistry related graphics in them. And that my chemistry teacher demanded to either be printed or be typed on a typewriter that would've been too expensive for my parents to be willing to afford. Just to give only some idea of where I am coming from. I digress.

I'd better not get you started on defragging!

kelper said:

I'd better not get you started on defragging!

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I promise, you'll lose again if you try. lol

hdmi said:

I promise, you'll lose again if you try. lol

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Rubbish, you don't even know where I stand on using defraggers!

kelper said:

Rubbish, you don't even know where I stand on using defraggers!

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lol

TraderGary said:

@allan Of course. Copilot results are thoroughly footnoted and the footnotes are clickable to check validity. I use Copilot because I get good reliable summaries and I don't have to wade though myriads of Google ads to get what I want.

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That would work for something that had a definitive answer but in this case, it doesn't as you will have the following camps or more:

Those who have no experience and say it doesn't help.
Those who have no experience and say it helps.
Those who have experience and say it helps.
Those who have experience and say it doesn't help.

And ofcourse, regardless which answer one uses, none of the people provided measurements or actual data to support their answer.

So the only thing is to try it themselves and draw their own conclusion as that is what matters.
As what one person considers as bloated might not be bloated to others, etc.

And while there are sizes of registry files mentioned, there is still nothing to show for a given size, how much resources as in User, GDI, heaps and memory is actually used to make a difference. Obviously, it shouldn't make a difference on a system with a small registry footprint but once a certain minimum size footprint is met, then it might make a difference but still, the only way to know the answer is from personal experience which is what matters at the end of the day as it's one own system since no one else cares except one's own self. And the following is just a made up example: Let's say one day someone discovered and proved that if you don't clean your registry, it uses up 8GB of RAM or something or CPU time. It might not mean much for people with a lot of RAM or a very fast CPU since it's only a small percentage but for those with slower CPUs or a low amount of memory, that is already a big percentage which will be significant.

It's almost like which came first, the chicken or the egg or the infamous which is the correct way the toilet tissue should be facing, inwards or outwards and even with that, there was a definitive answer which is proven from the 1891 patent which was later posted that ended that debate.

There is always risk with everything. You can either stay with the crowd and not get further than the crowd or you can get ahead of the crowd and be a leader. Remember Bill Gates was the richest person in the world since the 1980s I believe but then you have other people who take risk like Elon Musk and Jeffrey Bezos, who basically took the risk and then ended up being richer than Bill Gates.

So when it comes to registry cleaners, it depends on which one actually knows what it's doing and removes things that are not used or invalid only and not talking about removes things in the registry that should not be removed with the later which obviously is bad. And then ofcourse like mentioned, there are registry cleaners where it's not only what they scanned but also what the user also removes on their own that may have played a key role in the system being unusable or unstable so there are many variables involved and until one has 100% of the facts in detail, it would be hard to know if the answer is 100% valid or not as there can be other things that were not disclosed that caused the problem.

So in the end, it's if that individual is willing to take the risk or not using the proper precautions like backing up, imaging, etc before it's done or go 100% all risk by just doing it without the proper precautions. No different than people who do clean installs regularly or try out different builds of Windows on a regular basis.

And ofcourse liability, it is safer to answer with registry cleaning does not help than it does since one can be held liable for any damages that might arise if someone else followed it and it did end up with stability and/or system unbootable issues when the safer answer is to say it does not help because nothing bad can happen with that answer and it's the safest of the two answers.

So even in my case, while I say I clean up the registry including compacting it and the resulting is it is smaller. I have never did any measurements so I can't tell you if it was faster or slower than before. All I can tell you was that after 30.9 years and this is from 52 automatic cleanings a year which is 1606 cleanings, it didn't result in a unstable or unbootable system (yet). And when it comes to defraggers, Microsoft didn't develop their own as even in MS-DOS in the mid-1980s, all they did was licensed it from Norton Utilities and/or Central Point PC-Tools so like the saying, always take everything with two huge grains of salt when the answer is open ended in both directions even though in one of the scenarios, one is looking at the worse scenario possible which may or may not even happen.

The only time I ever had a unbootable system was because I set a variable for csrss.exe to a number too high for Windows XP (32 bit) to handle but that was easily fixed by exporting the registry to a 1.44MB Floppy Disk and then mounting that registry hive on another machine to use a smaller number and then importing that registry key to the problem machine. The other time was recently where with the SkuSiPolicy.p7b as instructed by Guidance for blocking rollback of Virtualization-based Security (VBS) related security updates - Microsoft Support - it would cause a BSOD each time but the system would be fine after removing the file.