Registry cleaner

[bullpup]

Can anyone please recommend a good registry cleaner that will give my pc a good cleanout? Naturally a free one would be ideal. Many thanks

[allenf]

I wouldn't recommend any personally.

The wikipedia article suggests that any benefit (negligible at best) is outweighed by the more than trivial chance a clean will do some serious damage:

"On Windows 9x computers, it is possible that a very large registry could slow down the computer's startup time. However this is far less of an issue with NT-based Operating Systems (including Windows XP and Vista) due to a different on-disk structure of the registry, improved memory management and indexing.[8]Slowdown due to registry bloat is thus far less of an issue in modern versions of Windows. More importantly, however, the difference in speed due to the use of a registry cleaner is negligible: rarely do they remove more than a few kilobytes from the total size of the registry. In fact, technology journalist Ed Bott has claimed that no-one has ever successfully managed to measure any significant performance increase from the use of a registry cleaner.[9] Any potential user of a registry cleaner must thus balance a probably negligible performance increase against the possibility of system instability. A safer and more measurable approach to Registry performance is to defragment the Registry files using a Microsoft-supported tool such as PageDefrag."
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registry_cleaner

If your pc is getting really slow (and having done virus/malware scans etc) the only reliable fix is a complete fresh reinstall or restore from a known good image...

[bullpup]

Thanks very much for that - interesting reading. I am having a problem with Explorer 7 - it keeps shutting down and I rather hoped that a comprehensive cleanout in addition to browser history, cookies etc would do the trick but having used Piriforms CC Cleaner it doesn't seem to make any difference.

[allenf]

Have you tried disabling/uninstalling any/all IE7 add-ons, helpers, search bars etc?
Have you tried another browser (Firefox, Opera, Chrome etc) and are they stable?
I am hesitant to recommend installing the IE8 beta (I've had some mixed results with it) as it will be going gold shortly, you could wait for that.

[Deleted]

bullpup
I have had no end of trouble with IE7 doing all kinds of weird things,(several times!) even sending multiple messages.I believe most of the problem is the limited area reserved for the DB files. (Files with large attachments all add up.) You really need to delete as many as possible of messages in your send, receive and delete folders and then compress them. Apparently the DB info gets damaged and compressing creates new headers.
The attached link gives a good starting point.
SandyK

www.microsoft.com/windows/IE/community/columns/oerepair.mspx

If your pc is getting really slow (and having done virus/malware scans etc) the only reliable fix is a complete fresh reinstall or restore from a known good image...

Sometimes this can be caused by Network settings. It appears my son set up another PC on the wireless network, and then I chased my tail for more than a month until a friend found that lots of information was being sent out to the network on program startups, that shouldn't have been. Much of the problem is that many programs"call home" before they do initialise.

[bullpup]

Thanks Sandyk. I use Oulook not Express so I will need to ascertain if a similar process will work. I will try and find mu Auto Archive Settings.

[Deleted]

bullpup
Sorry, I was in a hurry to go Supermarket shopping. I meant Outlook. You will notice that at the end of the link, it says "oerepair".

SandyK

[robertkd]

sometimes blowing away the VM use to fix pesky strangeness in winows just a thought.

[charleyphogg]

Don't know if this applies, but try CCCleaner. It gets rid of all those useless info, cookies nad such tat ur pc accumulates over time. I.E. dumps and cleans temp files for eaample

[charleyphogg]

Feb 26, 2009 19:43:55 GMT allenf said:

Have you tried disabling/uninstalling any/all IE7 add-ons, helpers, search bars etc?

Good often unlooked point.