How to choose a good registry cleaner

The Windows registry is the storehouse of all the important information about hardware and software that Windows needs to keep your computer working efficiently.

The registry is such a vital part of your Windows operating system that one must not underestimate the importance of choosing a good registry repair program to help you to repair it when things go wrong.

Reasons why the registry can corrupted and cause problems.

If you are like most Windows users then you probably install and uninstall programs such as utilities quite often just to try them out, or install new drivers for some hardware device. The trouble is, every time you make changes to your software or hardware then the registry gets a new entry added to it. You might think that by uninstalling a program that the uninstaller would cleanly remove the information about it that was stored in the registry, but very often this does not happen.

The net result of all this installing and uninstalling is that the registry will have a build-up of useless data that will slowly degrade the performance of your computer. Registry problems cause slow startup times, sluggish performance and even serious operating system errors that can cause malfunction of software, hardware, and even loss of important data.

The dumb way to repair your registry.

It is possible to manually edit the registry yourself to remove any empty or invalid keys and data but this is time-consuming and requires expert knowledge so that you don’t delete anything of vital importance to your computer systems proper functioning.

If you are inexperienced then it is easy to delete or change something, which could then make your computer behave erratically or become completely unusable. The best advice is to leave manual registry editing to real computer experts.

For those who don’t have the knowledge (or nerve) to edit the registry manually themselves the best option is buy a registry repair utility that will scan your registry and, if necessary, remove all invalid entries that have been left behind.

Why registry cleaners are the best way to repair your registry.

A registry cleaner is small software utility that will automatically scan your entire registry and find all the unused and invalid entries. It should then report on all the problems it finds and let you decide whether to delete all of them or just a certain selection. It is important to choose a good registry cleaner that can make a safe backup of the registry before you allow it to make any changes.

Using a registry cleaner will help to keep your computer functioning correctly and help it to run at optimum performance at all times. There are many registry repair utilities available and some are better than others so choose one that has the most useful features.

Some features come as standard with all registry cleaners but some are optional and may be useful extras. Here are some important features of a good registry cleaner…

The ability to backup and restore the registry

Any registry cleaner worth buying will do an automatic backup of your registry before scanning for errors and repairing your registry. This is a vital safety precaution that you must not overlook.

The ability to find various registry problems.

Not all registry cleaners do a perfect job of finding problems and they should be capable of finding and fixing errors such as:

Empty registry keys.
Corrupt files.
Spyware entries.
References to uninstalled software.
Incorrect program shortcuts
Invalid Shell Extensions and Class Keys

Other useful features in a good registry cleaner.

Intuitive interface:

A well-designed interface will keep you informed of the scan progress at all times and allow you to make important decisions along the way if necessary.

Startup Manager:

If you find that your PC is slow at startup it could be due to applications being launched automatically when you first start your PC. Many of these extra programs are not even necessary and will use up memory and slow down your PC dramatically.

A registry cleaner that includes a startup manager will let you choose to prevent all non-essential programs being loaded at startup, giving you a much faster startup time.

Automatic scheduler:

It is easy to forget to maintain your registry until it starts to cause you problems so the best registry cleaners will have an automatic schedule option that you can set to scan your registry. With this option you can set it to run a scan on a regular basis to keep your registry optimized at all times.

Automatic or manual registry repair:

This feature will allow you to choose whether you want the registry repair utility to automatically find and fix all registry problems without your intervention or prompt you to make decisions on what errors to fix during the scan. A nice user interface makes this so much easier too.

Customizable:

The best registry repair utilities can be customized to fix only certain errors and ignore any that you deem are unimportant. In effect this means that they should let you create an ‘ignore list’ so that they will only scan for and fix the problems you decide on.

A good registry repair utility will do safely in seconds what would take you ages to do manually and without the worry of making mistakes that could spell disaster for your PC.

A highly recommended utility that does everything necessary to repair a faulty registry is RegCure.

Download the free scan tool to check for registry problems by clicking on the button below.

Why manually editing the registry is a dangerous thing to do

The registry inevitably needs editing after some time to help your PC run more efficiently - and you can do it manually if you have the know-how and the nerve. Be warned though that making manual edits to the registry can have drastic consequences if you make a mistake, which is easy to do. Some people do hack the registry successfully but it is a dangerous thing to do for the average computer user. Read more

Windows Registry Structure

Keys and Values

The registry contains two basic kinds of elements: keys and values.

Registry Keys are similar to folders - in addition to values, each key can contain subkeys, which may contain further subkeys, and so on. Keys are referenced with a syntax similar to Windows’ path names, using backslashes to indicate levels of hierarchy. E.g. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows refers to the subkey “Windows” of the subkey “Microsoft” of the subkey “Software” of the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE key.

Registry Values are name/data pairs stored within keys. Values are referenced separately from keys. Value names can contain backslashes which would lead to ambiguities were they referred to like paths. The Windows API functions that query and manipulate registry values take value names separately from the key path and/or handle that identifies the parent key.

The terminology is somewhat misleading, as the values are similar to an associative array, where standard terminology would refer to the name part of the value as a “key”. The terms are a holdout from the 16-bit registry in Windows 3, in which keys could not contain arbitrary name/data pairs, but rather contained only one unnamed value (which had to be a string).

In this sense, the entire registry was like an associative array where the keys (in both the registry sense and dictionary sense) formed a hierarchy, and the values were all strings. When the 32-bit registry was created, so was the additional capability of creating multiple named values per key, and the meanings of the names were somewhat distorted.

There are a number of different types of values:

Hives

The Registry is split into a number of logical sections, or “hives”. Hives are generally named by their Windows API definitions, which all begin “HKEY”. They are abbreviated to a three- or four-letter short name starting with “HK” (e.g. HKCU and HKLM).

The HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE and HKEY_CURRENT_USER nodes have a similar structure to each other; applications typically look up their settings by first checking for them in “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Vendor’s name\Application’s name\Version\Setting name”, and if the setting is not found looking instead in the same location under the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE key.

When writing settings back, the reverse approach is used — HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE is written first, but if that cannot be written to (which is usually the case if the logged-in user is not an administrator), the setting is stored in HKEY_CURRENT_USER instead.

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT

Abbreviated HKCR, HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT stores information about registered applications, such as Associations from File Extensions and OLE Object Class IDs tying them to the applications used to handle these items. On Windows 2000 and above, HKCR is a compilation of HKCU\Software\Classes and HKLM\Software\Classes. If a given value exists in both of the subkeys above, the one in HKCU\Software\Classes is used.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER

Abbreviated HKCU, HKEY_CURRENT_USER stores settings that are specific to the currently logged-in user. The HKCU key is a link to the subkey of HKEY_USERS that corresponds to the user; the same information is reflected in both locations. On Windows-NT based systems, each user’s settings are stored in their own files called NTUSER.DAT and USRCLASS.DAT inside their own documents and settings subfolder.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE

Abbreviated HKLM, HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE stores settings that are general to all users on the computer. On NT-based versions of Windows, HKLM contains four subkeys, SAM, SECURITY, SOFTWARE and SYSTEM, that are found within their respective files located in the %SystemRoot%\System32\Config folder.

A fifth subkey, HARDWARE, is volatile and is created dynamically, and as such is not stored in a file. Information about system hardware drivers and services are located under the SYSTEM subkey, whilst the SOFTWARE subkey contains software and windows settings.

HKEY_USERS

Abbreviated HKU, HKEY_USERS contains subkeys corresponding to the HKEY_CURRENT_USER keys for each user registered on the machine.

HKEY_CURRENT_CONFIG

Abbreviated HKCC, HKEY_CURRENT_CONFIG contains information gathered at runtime; information stored in this key is not permanently stored on disk, but rather regenerated at boot time.

HKEY_PERFORMANCE_DATA

This key provides runtime information into performance data provided by either the NT kernel itself or other programs that provide performance data. This key is not displayed in the Registry Editor, but it is visible through the registry functions in the Windows API.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_registry

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