Registry Cleaners

I recently have noticed a lot of registry cleaners. Are these any better
than the registry fixer in Winsows98, or something that would do a lot
better job to clean-up and stop so many hangs and errors.
Bellmeister.

No Registry cleaner is a safe thing for anyone to use who doesn't know what they
are looking at. None of them are infallible. Some are good tools to have in
one's arsenal as a pro or talented aficionado, always remembering that each and
every proposed "fix" may or may not be a safe move and should be investigated
and "sanity-checked" before acting.

That said, assuming that the first thing you do is to learn how to back up and
restore backups of the Registry, it's always worth a try. Just remember that if
you use Scanreg to make backups, and you make several, you may end up not being
able to get back to a state precious to when the entire exercise began.

How can I say this more plainly? Be very, very careful, think five times before
"fixing" something. And no, I won't recommend any. Haven't been checking them
out lately, so I don't know which ones are safest anymore.

--
Gary S. Terhune
MS MVP Shell/User

"Bell Moore" wrote in message
...
I recently have noticed a lot of registry cleaners. Are these any better
than the registry fixer in Winsows98, or something that would do a lot
better job to clean-up and stop so many hangs and errors.
Bellmeister.

Right on!

The best - and (really the only) way to effectively clean the registry, is
thru a clean install of Windows!

Nuff said!

OK, I'm off the podium now too. Thanks for sharing it, Gary :-)


Gary S. Terhune wrote:
No Registry cleaner is a safe thing for anyone to use who doesn't know
what
they are looking at. None of them are infallible. Some are good tools to
have
in one's arsenal as a pro or talented aficionado, always remembering that
each and every proposed "fix" may or may not be a safe move and should be
investigated and "sanity-checked" before acting.

That said, assuming that the first thing you do is to learn how to back up
and
restore backups of the Registry, it's always worth a try. Just remember
that
if you use Scanreg to make backups, and you make several, you may end up
not
being able to get back to a state precious to when the entire exercise
began.

How can I say this more plainly? Be very, very careful, think five times
before "fixing" something. And no, I won't recommend any. Haven't been
checking them out lately, so I don't know which ones are safest anymore.

--
Gary S. Terhune
MS MVP Shell/User

"Bell Moore" wrote in message
...
I recently have noticed a lot of registry cleaners. Are these any better
than the registry fixer in Winsows98, or something that would do a lot
better job to clean-up and stop so many hangs and errors.
Bellmeister.

"Bell Moore" wrote:

I recently have noticed a lot of registry cleaners. Are these any better
than the registry fixer in Winsows98, or something that would do a lot
better job to clean-up and stop so many hangs and errors.
Bellmeister.


A regsitry cleaner can do a fair bit more than the Scanreg utility
that comes with Windows, especially with respect to removing leftover
registry entries from programs that have been uninstalled.

While no registry cleaner is 100% failure proof I have had good
results with RegSeeker from
http://www.snapfiles.com/get/regseeker.html

One thing with RegSeeker (and possibly other registry cleaners as
well) and that is that it will usually take multiple passes to really
clean up the registry. I usually keep running RegSeeker until it
finds fewer than 20 items to remove. This usually takes 3 passes, but
sometimes it can be as many as 5.

And make sure that you create a manual backup of your registry just
before you run RegSeeker or any other registry cleaner. Use Start -
Run and enter

SCANREGW /BACKUP

in the dialog box.

Good luck


Ron Martell Duncan B.C. Canada
--
Microsoft MVP
On-Line Help Computer Service
http://onlinehelp.bc.ca

"The reason computer chips are so small is computers don't eat much."

"Ron Martell" wrote in message
...

[snip]
And make sure that you create a manual backup of your registry just
before you run RegSeeker or any other registry cleaner. Use Start -
Run and enter

SCANREGW /BACKUP

in the dialog box.

Good luck


Ron Martell Duncan B.C. Canada
--
Microsoft MVP
On-Line Help Computer Service
http://onlinehelp.bc.ca

"The reason computer chips are so small is computers don't eat much."

Just adding to Ron's comment about making a manual backup:
Make sure you know HOW to restore the Registry from the backup before using a
Registry cleaner.
PS: I also use RegSeeker and don't have problems with it.