I’ve seen users who run a registry cleaner every day. This is a sure recipe for trouble. And it’s the worst kind of trouble; unnecessary trouble. The daily, weekly or even monthly use of a registry cleaner is highly unlikely to improve your PC’s performance yet it is highly likely to sooner or later to mess up your PC.

So where should you use a registry cleaner?

Sometimes they are useful for cleaning up after a failed program installation.

Sometimes they can be used to rejuvenate a PC that is running really slowly.

Sometimes they represent a useful last resort to get in an erratically performing PC working again.

There are a lot of “sometimes” there and my usage is quite deliberate. Re...

I’ve seen users who run a registry cleaner every day. This is a sure recipe for trouble. And it’s the worst kind of trouble; unnecessary trouble. The daily, weekly or even monthly use of a registry cleaner is highly unlikely to improve your PC’s performance yet it is highly likely to sooner or later to mess up your PC.

So where should you use a registry cleaner?

Sometimes they are useful for cleaning up after a failed program installation.

Sometimes they can be used to rejuvenate a PC that is running really slowly.

Sometimes they represent a useful last resort to get in an erratically performing PC working again.

There are a lot of “sometimes” there and my usage is quite deliberate. Registry cleaners won’t necessarily help any of the problems I’ve listed but sometimes they do. They are however, not a magic solution.

So do you need a registry cleaner?
Yes, I think they are a necessary tool you need to have available. Just make sure you always do a backup before you use one.

And what’s the best registry cleaner?
In my books, the one that causes the fewest problems. Almost always the registry cleaners that cause the fewest problems are those that have regularly updated exception lists and are conservative in their operation.

This approach stands in stark contrast to those who evaluate registry cleaners according to the number of “errors” they find, with those products that find the most, rated most highly.

I disagree totally with this approach but my viewpoint is not widely shared by average users. Unfortunately this has put marketing pressure on software developers to come up with registry cleaners that find ever more “errors,” an approach that is not in anyone’s interest.
So what do I make of Registry First Aid?

Hard to say without using it over the longer term. What I can say is that it does have an exception list which is a good start — many registry cleaners don’t have such a list. How frequently they update this list I cannot say.

Registry First Aid seems to find a lot of errors compared to a couple of other registry cleaners I tried. But to its credit, it doesn’t normally recommend yo...

I disagree totally with this approach but my viewpoint is not widely shared by average users. Unfortunately this has put marketing pressure on software developers to come up with registry cleaners that find ever more “errors,” an approach that is not in anyone’s interest.
So what do I make of Registry First Aid?

Hard to say without using it over the longer term. What I can say is that it does have an exception list which is a good start — many registry cleaners don’t have such a list. How frequently they update this list I cannot say.

Registry First Aid seems to find a lot of errors compared to a couple of other registry cleaners I tried. But to its credit, it doesn’t normally recommend you delete all those errors. Instead it suggests you only delete the errors rated as “safe.” That strikes me as a pretty smart approach which balances marketing needs with practical requirements.

These are the however, just superficial observations. The proof of the pudding is in the eating and I haven’t sampled this dish over a long enough time to make a judgement.

Gizmo