Registry Cleaners for Vista

[Marin85]

Hi,
Are there any good registry cleaners for Vista 32bit out there. I currently have CCleaner but I only use it to clean my HD, not to fix registry issues. In the past I tried RFA Platinum for my XP but surprisingly it caused some issues with USBs and Sonic, so I´m not sure if it´s a good idea to try it under Vista (maybe this time it will work o.k...) I also have TuneUp utilities but I never let it clean the registry.
Any tips or advices will be appreciated.

Marin

MOD EDIT: Moved to Windows Vista forum.

[ryengineer]

Registry First Aid.

[Marin85]

You´re probabely right, I should give a second chance to RFA.


Sorry, MOD, I didn´t know that there is a seperate forum for Vista I had to find it out in the difficult way

[PDX28]

I'm using Registry First Aid also without any problems so far.


Gruss nach Deutschland.

[Marin85]

Hi,
I did some search here regarding RFA and many users reported as well that RFA seems to work fine if only modifying the green (safe) entries (as far as there is a permission to). However, I could find an invalid entry that RFA was about to correct in a very wrong way. Here the steps I got through:
1. I downloaded all XP drivers from Lenovo as I was going to make a clean install of XP (for some unknown reasons my Vista became very slowww at some moments), so I created a folder on my dekstop called "ThinkPad drivers for XP".
2. Then I burned the folder on a CD.
3. Then I deleted the folder as I had all the necessairy installers on a CD.
4. Then I run RFA Platinum 6.0 biuld 1377. It found a registry key pointing to the subfolder (in "ThinkPad drivers for XP"), containing the UltraNav installers, which, of course, were altogether missing. RFA wanted to "redirect" that key to C:\Drivers\WIN\UNAV (or something like this), where actually the UltraNav drivers are unpacked... (I didn´t install anything from the questionable folder, simply downloaded the installers for later purposes)

I find that very suspicious... Correct me if I´m wrong, but RFA should actually delete that entry instead.
Maybe, someone of you could run these steps to check if it happens only with me ot it´s a bug of RFA. Also, I was curious what other "damages" RFA could make to the registry, so I let it correct all the green entries it had a permission for. After rebooting, all my Virtual CD (v9.1) file associations were broken and the corresponding icons were changed to "undefined". And probabely there were some other issues.





Danke, grüße dich ebenfalls

[dfumento]

I *was* using registry mechanic but then the subscription ran out and I don't get the updates.
Now, instead I use the on-line Microsoft Onecare product, just selecting file cleanup, registry clean, and ports check.

http://onecare.live.com/site/en-us/default.htm

[bill bolton]

I find that very suspicious... Correct me if I´m wrong, but RFA should actually delete that entry instead.

I suggest that have an unreasonable expectation in terms of the level of expert system/artifical intelligence you can acquire for ~$35!

Also, if you expect any Registery maintenance tool not to be intrinsically dangerous by its very nature, you shouldn't touching the Windows registry at all!

RFA always wants to make a registry back up before committing any changes precisely because it can't know with absolute certainty what the by-products of some chnages will be, particularly those where the registry entry points to something which is no longer present in the system environment.

Cheers,

Bill B.

[noetus]

Can someone tell me what the actual benefit of "cleaning" the registry is, apart from making us feel better about our installations?

I have noticed for a long time that experts over at ArsTechnica.com and other similar places generally heap scorn on registry tweaks and cleaners (and generally any form of 'tweaking' Windows through the use of memory managers and the like).

If there really is junk in the registry (which I know there usually is, from uninstalled programs that have been sloppily written, and the like) won't Windows just ignore it? Unless windows is returning an error because of a registry problem, which will show up in the System Log and can be manually fixed, shouldn't we just leave the registry alone?

I have been using CleanMyPC registry cleaner (which was the first to support Vista) and though it seems to be pretty careful, I have recently had problems that I traced to missing/corrupted items in my Registry. I have no idea if CMPC caused the problem or not, but I think I'll just play it safe with the next installation of Vista and not bother with these tools.

[spwhiting@]

RFA removed the registery information for "TRAYAPP" from the T60 VISTA Home Premium OS. TRAYAPP is used by the HP All In One printer C5180 and other HP printers. The only way to reinstall the TRAYAPP file was to remove the HP printer and reinstall the printer drivers.

[jdhurst]

In a perfect PC, there would be no need for a registry cleaner. I am suspect of most of them. However, RFA fixed a problem on my XP Pro ThinkPad related to a failed attempt (on my part) to install a NIC that Access Connections did not support. Otherwise RFA in XP has caused me no grief.

There are at least 3 kinds of entries that RFA will remove:

1. Orphan file handles and old file entries. I fix these before running RFA by clearing recent documents (Properties of the Start button); running and executing CheckLinks (Windows Resource Kit); and running Disk Cleanup. This reduces what RFA will find.
2. Left over keys from uninstalls which do not clean up after themselves. In my opinion, more than 75% of uninstalls do not clean up, which is what gave rise to registry cleaners in the first place.
3. Bad keys that didn't get removed because of multiple installs, failed usage, and other problems. It was category 3 removals that fixed my problem above.

... JDH

[Marin85]

Hi,
thanks for all your posts, guys! In the past I had a lot of software issues because I didn´t pay much attention to what RFA was exactly doing with my regestry, but I learnt my lessons. Nevertheless, RFA is a very valuable tool to me since it solved various problems after much of installing and uninstalling. A few days ago Matlab R2007 didn´t install correctly and couldn´t launch at all, so we tried ot reinstall the program, but in vain. We played installing-uninstalling several times with no result. Then I ran RFA and it found several obsolete keys of Matlab which hadn´t been removed at all. After deleting those keys Matlab installed properly. So, what I do now, is basically to manually check every single green key found by RFA. From my point of view, RFA simply shows possible problems. If one is an expert of Windows, RFA could be a really powerful tool in his hands, I think. Unfortunately, I´m not one, so I just avoid modifying any entries referring to my system.
A perfect PC or a registry cleaner with AI is for now as good as utopic, but close to that isn´t, is it...

Cheers

Marin

[pae77]

I've had good results so far under XP and Vista 64 with the "Tune Up Registry Cleaner" in "TuneUp Utilities 2007." It always makes a back up before it makes any changes but I have never needed it so far. The program has many other useful utilities as well.