Advertisements for registry cleaners are all over the Web. There’s an
entire industry out there bent on convincing inexperienced computer
users that their registry needs fixing, and that, for ten easy payments
of $29.95, their computers will be much faster. That isn’t true. The
Windows registry is a massive database containing hundreds of thousands
of entries, and a registry cleaner might remove a few hundred at most.
This is great if you’re obsessively compulsive about removing useless
database entries, but you won’t see any difference in performance. What
you might see is a new problem because the registry cleaner swept away
something important.
What’s the Registry?
The Windows registry is a database that Windows and its applications
store their settings in. It contains hundreds of thousands of entries.
Some of the entries may be slightly outdated — maybe you’ve uninstalled a
program and it left a key or two behind, or maybe a there’s a file
extension with no associated application.
What Registry Cleaners Do
Registry cleaners scan your registry for these outdated entries and
offer to remove them. Because there are so many registry entries to go
through, they’ll sometimes also remove useful registry entries, causing
you problems. The Web is full of stories from people who have run a
registry cleaner and encountered problems.
In a best case scenario, a registry cleaner will remove a few hundred
unnecessary entries and reduce the size of your registry by a few
kilobytes. This makes no different in perceptible performance. But
you’ll still see shady advertisements like this one all over the Web:
A registry cleaner that claims to
improve performance by removing a few hundred registry entries is like a
file system cleaner that offers to improve performance by removing a
handful of small configuration files.
Using a Registry Cleaner
If you must use a registry cleaner, you don’t have to pay anything.
Using a free registry cleaner, such as the registry cleaner included
with the respected
CCleaner utility (which
we’ve covered in the past),
is good enough. In fact, you’ll probably have better results with
CCleaner than many of these fly-by-night companies. And by “have better
results,” I mean that CCleaner is less likely to break things. Any
performance increases will still be unnoticeable.
“Optimizing” the Registry
Registry cleaners also claim to optimize your registry, defragmenting
it for faster file access. At first, this sounds great — your registry
is constantly being used, so surely defragmenting it will offer
improvements in speed, right?
Wrong. Or, at least, not really. The registry is loaded into your
computer’s RAM when it starts, so you won’t see faster registry
performance as a result of this.
If you really want to defragment your registry, you don’t need a registry cleaner. Microsoft offers an official
PageDefrag utility for Windows XP. Windows 7 or Vista users will need an unofficial utility like
Auslogics Registry Defrag.
Auslogics Registry Defrag dramatically overpromises the imperceptible
performance boosts you’ll get from running it, but at least it doesn’t
tamper with your registry. And at least it’s free.
Use one of these utilities if you want. But I’ll warn you now: You won’t see a difference in performance.
Where Are the Performance Tests?
Here’s the thing: We computer geeks love squeezing every drop of
performance out of our systems. People benchmark all sorts of software
tweaks and hardware overclocks and create performance graphs that show
adjusting one setting makes a certain game 1% faster.
If registry cleaners really worked, there would be serious,
independent performance tests that showed the performance increase after
running a registry cleaner. But there aren’t. If you find a test, it
was likely produced by a registry cleaner company or an affiliate site
that gets paid when you buy a registry cleaner. If you disagree with
this post, let’s see some reputable performance benchmarks.
Above: Not an actual scientific test. But I bet you can’t find a better chart.
The Verdict
Here’s what it comes down to:
- Registry cleaners offer no perceptible increase in performance.
- Registry cleaners can break things.
- Even if registry cleaners don’t break anything, using one wastes your valuable time and (perhaps) money.
If you’re looking to increase your PC’s performance, there are
real steps you can take instead of buying the snake oil on offer. In fact, we’ve got an
entire free guide to speeding up your computer, and registry cleaning isn’t involved.
Sign in to the app with your MEGA account and wait for it to fetch a
list of files you’ve uploaded. The files themselves aren’t automatically
downloaded to your device, so the list will load fairly quickly
depending on how many files you’ve uploaded. From left to right, the
buttons at the bottom allow you to upload a file, update files list,
create a new folder, download a file from a link, and visit your
profile.
