The risks of using registry cleaners

[HardBeatZ]

Let me start off by saying it right at the beginning using registry cleaners is a bad idea, and it is not advisable for the average user.

Let’s go into more detail as to why you don’t want to use a registry cleaner. The registry of your computer is the brain. It is where your computer keeps its database of configuration settings and options.  When you learned to walk your brain stored that information and kept it in a sealed off section of your brain, that’s your computer. When your computer learned how to run a particular program it puts that information inside the registry.

Here is what your registry looks like.

 

For the most part it doesn’t matter what these different categories are as we are not going to mess with them. This is just a general if you ever see this screen then you know what you are looking at.

So what is a registry cleaner and why is it sometimes advised to run. A registry cleaner advertises that it will go into your registry and remove any files that are no longer needed. By removing these rogue registry files your computer will theoretically run faster and better.

What are rogue registry files? When you uninstall a program it should remove all traces of itself from your computer including registry files. Not all programs do this properly or even can do it properly. So when the program gets uninstalled its existence may still live in your registry. To bring the analogy back to your brain, if you have a traumatic event (in this case the traumatic event on your computer being uninstalling the program) your brain will help you forget it happened, but it is still there. Even though you uninstall that program there are traces of it that still exist.

So uninstalling a program doesn’t really uninstall the program completely and there are programs that will remove those files why do I not want to do that? It’s simple really, most registry programs will cause more problems than they solve. Registry cleaners attempt to identify what programs and registry files your computer no longer needs and removes them which are great if it is a guaranteed 100% that it will only delete what is really needed to be deleted.

The problem is they don’t guarantee that and some may end up giving false positives and accidently deleting needed registry files for your computer to act and function properly.

You know the risks and may still want to go with a registry program then there are some things you can at least do to protect yourself.

1. Ensure the program you are purchasing or acquiring is from a reputable company
2. Ensure you have the latest version of the software for your operating system and the program is designed to run on your operating system
3. Ensure it backs your registry up before it begins to go through deleting everything.

By making sure you are at least taking steps to protect yourself when running a registry cleaner you may find you get good results. For the most part though if you don’t know then leave it be. There are many other solutions available to you that may help you keep your computer running effectively, personally I would recommend this read Computer maintenance and its importance, but I may be biased.

[HardBeatZ · Accepted solution]

If you have any questions or comments I'm open to hear them.

1. If you have already ran a registry cleaner and are having problems, my recommendation is to do a system restore to a date before you ran the program

2. I will not give recommendations on what programs to use

[DavidPK]

Hi,

Excellent advice and I really liked the analogy with the brain

Best regards,

DP-K