Registry cleaner

[x215]

Does anybody know of any Registry Cleaner that is free?

[drdaco]

no...but why chance it?

the last thing I want is some registry cleaner screwing up my proggies...

[vern]

Depends on the O/S, Microsoft used to offer something called REGCLEAN.EXE it worked great on Windows 95, 98, and NT.

I WOULD NOT CHANCE IT ON XP!!

Microsoft no longer offers it on their site, however is available from Download.com at

http://www.download.com/3000-2094-88...ml?legacy=cnet

[Nexus]

Download.com is a good place to search, use the filters to look for the free ones, but its more than likely that anything thats free is either not going to work properly or do some irreversable damage.

Russian Roulette anyone?

[agog]

Sometimes retail software is pretty dodgy too. I can think of one company in particular...
... without which this site wouldn't exist.

[blockcipher]

I use easy cleaner.

http://forums.winforums.org/files/ec.exe

[RS-232C]

I actually just fired my registry cleaner last week, she left some dust on my CLSID.

"no...but why chance it?
the last thing I want is some registry cleaner screwing up my proggies..."

Many programs of this kind will have backup protection built in. Even if the one you're using doesn't, it's always good to have a backup (either manually/system restore).

[blockcipher]

Easy Cleaner does have backup protection.

[RS-232C]

Yuppers.

[satyr]

Originally Posted by x215

Does anybody know of any Registry Cleaner that is free?

1. One very good and powerful, though shareware is called Registry First Aid from KsL Software and Published by RoseCitySoftware. I wrote powerful, cause it doesn't "clean" automaticly (as most of registry "cleaners"), but just finds invalid/orphaned entries, and scans disk for possible solutions. It has also all other important options as backing up every "fixing session" sepately, and backing up the whole registry and system settings (directs you to System Restore), it also support cmdline parameter /restwizard to execute wizard restore wizard GUI. It has default excluded file paths (those that are dangerous to modify), excluded registry keys, and excluded paths and keys by user. Also, it is made by well-known and trusted company.


You get Registry First Aid at:

www.RoseCitySoftware.com/Reg1Aid/


It offers this options after scan:

"Fix entry" (to the value that you choose manually)
"Leave entry without change"
"Delete entry"
"Cut Invalid Substring" (for more complicated values).



2. There is also other, freeware, called RegCleaner (or shortened to RegCleanr, cause of Microsoft's similar name for some in-built app on 9x systems). It also doesn't clean automaticly also (ok, you can set it to, but I prefer not to), but you manually choose which ones to remove/delete. It scans registry and disk same as Registry First Aid (to decide which ones are invalid) but only offers to remove enties, so its is not able to fix them. That feature is big advantage of Registry First Aid.


It was developed by/under Macecraft Software (Macecraft Inc.), their site is:

http://www.jv16.org/


You get RegCleaner at:

http://www.worldstart.com/weekly-dow...cleaner4.3.htm



P.S., As far as registry "cleaning" being useless, it is not exactly so. Lots of programs leave various "left-overs" (useless values) after uninstalling them. It is somehow clever to remove them, sooner or later. They are just taking additional space, making registry operations slower (yes for 0.0000001 times, but having left-overs from 20 programs you uninstalled ...)

Of course you don't need special/additional software for that, one can simply delete them with Regedit, but it is much more comfortably this way.