Registry Cleaners are Snakeoil!

Please don't use registry cleaners or registry cleaning functions in other utilities! Extra registry entries do not slow your computer down! There is no need to shrink your registry! There are hundreds of thousands of entries in your registry. Windows isn't slowed down or even affected by registry keys left over by uninstalled programs. Individual registry entries are small. You could remove several thousand entries and not affect the size of it or how long it takes windows to access information in it. Back in the days of Windows 95, tiny amounts of memory, and slower hard drives, a smaller registry could have made a fractional difference in performance. That isn't the case today. There simply are not any legitimate benchmarks showing a performance boost from cleaning the registry on modern machines. This is a left over practice from older technology. It is another one of those PC performance myths that just wont seem to die.

If you are using computer that is 10 or even 15 years old and you have an original Windows installation that has had several thousand of programs installed and uninstalled over the last 10 or 15 years you might benefit from a smaller registry size. This computer would also need to have a fairly small amount of RAM for it to matter.

Removing or changing an incorrect registry value is certainly something that should be done if the key value is causing problems installing or running something. I have never relied on a registry cleaner to do this this however. I don't like using a shotgun approach on a problem if a precision instrument is available. If I knew enough to diagnose it as a registry issue I usually knew how find and correct it manually. For example, I have had to make registry changes to get software to run in wine and I have also had to make registry changes in the manual removal of certain types of malware. As a general tip for speeding a computer up however registry cleaning programs are useless.