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Is Registry Cleaner Helpful in Speeding Up Your PC and Prevent Crashes
Posted: Jul 04, 2014
Often used to remove redundant items from the Windows registry, a registry cleaner is a specialized third party software utility that is designed for the Microsoft Windows OS. Registry Cleaners claim that they offer useful repair to the uncertain situations and program specific issues that might arise while performing manual changes to applications, especially Component Object Model-COM-based programs. Tech experts have debated over the necessity and usefulness of Registry Cleaners, however, the discussion never came to an end and found experts in disagreement over their benefits.
The usage of such utilities is often discouraged by a user because of its association with malware and scareware, which may come bundled with the program. It is quite clear that the Registry Cleaners don’t speed up your PC and are often considered as complete waste of time and money.
In this article, you will read about how Registry Cleaners benefit to optimize your PC and why they are essential for your device.
Registry Cleaners aren’t magic wands
Often accessed to use as a complete solution to keep your Registry keys neat and clean, the Registry Cleaners aren’t a magic button that can speed up your PC. It’s just like scummy PC-cleaning software that helps you organize and clean the huge database of settings enlisted for Windows as well as the installed programs.
On installing a program, it’s quite possible that it would save its settings to the registry and will also save pointers to that program. For registering this program as the default one, you can easily pin-up the Windows database to save a registry entry for a certain file type, making it easier to remember that it is a default program.
When you uninstall the program, it would leave all its registry entries behind in the database and here is the point from where the work of cleaners begins. The entries will stay in your registry until either you reinstall the Windows, refresh your PC, clean them with a registry cleaner, or delete them manually.
A registry cleaner will only scan your registry for entries that are outdated and remove them immediately however, many registry cleaner companies claim that it would result in big performance improvements.
What are the common promises registry cleaner tools often make?
- Fixes registry errors that may cause system crashes and even blue-screens errors
- Use this cleaner to remove the junk that is clogging your device and slowing it down
- Eliminate ‘corrupted’ and ‘damaged’ entries
And the real picture….
In reality, registry entries that keep on lying inside your PC don’t drag its performance rather they are so tiny in nature that the OS doesn’t even bother about it. The Windows registry is a massive database that consists of around hundreds of thousands of program entries and the individual registry entries that a cleaner removes are just a few. Even removing a set of a few thousand entries won’t make a noticeable space in the size of your registry.
If your devices have a small amount of memory or an extremely slow hard disk, then only shrinking the registry will help you boost PC performance. But the effect of shrinking the entire registry database will not be visible on computers we use today as the system has evolved and now has a robust registry section.
Windows cannot slow down your PC just because you have a folder (named as ‘key’ in registry parlance) for entries of an uninstalled program in your registry or still have entries of an outdated program.
In Some Rare Cases…
Although, the tool doesn’t act as a magic wand but it can bring visible changes in some of the rare cases. If you have a program that has left behind an invalid context menu entry in your registry, then it’s possible that the context menu will take longer to appear in Windows Explorer. As soon as, you right-click on something, the mouse pointer will start rotating and asking you to wait for the entry to get loaded into the system. Registry Cleaner would notice and remove this entry entirely from the database, hence, resolves the problem of getting confused between the keys for installed or uninstalled programs.
Another case can be having a ten-year-old computer with a very small amount of RAM. You might have installed or uninstalled thousands of programs over the period of a decade, thus clogging your registry database with millions of individual entries. In this situation, a registry cleaner might theoretically help by shrinking the size of the registry to make the PC work faster.
If a Registry Cleaner won’t speed things Up, What it will do?
There can be infinite reasons behind why PCs slow down over a period of time and why it doesn’t respond in the same way like it does during its initial purchase. Insufficient RAM, virus attacks, varied start up issues, corrupt applications/programs, missing registry keys, installation of heavy applications, minimal storage space, and many other common reasons tend to slow down your device. Therefore, it is recommended to make a choice before installing any program on your device, rather than running a registry cleaner very frequently.
Even if you think that you need to uninstall something, let those few individual registry entries in the registry database as it won’t cause a slow down. If your PC is really slow or crashing frequently, then you should check out for the full registry statistics and reinstall Windows or refresh your PC.
It is really important to understand that Registry Cleaners can also cause severe damages when it scans different registry entries that are associated with different software programs. An average registry cleaner will put all the things together and will not be able to account the useful and waste entries from them. The entire process may end up resulting in deletion of some necessary entries that are essential for an installed program to add more problems.
All in all, a user should forget about Registry Cleaners and should continue using their devices more carefully. If you take basic care of your Windows PC, then you don’t have to worry about your registry and its entries. A PC with good configuration, sufficient RAM, and amazing storage space will never face registry issues as the individual keys are tiny in size and will not affect the device’s performance in most of the cases. It is recommended not to run a registry cleaner very frequently as it may delete some important registry keys that are essential for a program to function properly. Experts state that an average registry cleaner would cause many problems than it fixes, if run on a regular basis. The leftover or individual registry keys are completely harmless for the health of your device, hence, using it again and again is a complete waste of your time.
About the Author: Brooke M. Perry is an ardent technician associated with Qresolve remote computer support with wide experience of fixing issues with PCs, laptops, tablets and smartphones. With a strong track record of devising effective ways of internet security and system security, she has so far helped thousands of users across the globe.
Brooke M. Perry is an ardent technician associated with Qresolve computer security, with wide experience of fixing issues with PCs, laptops, tablets and smartphones.