whats good free (safe) registry cleaner you guys recommend?

This post has been edited by jmoney3457: Feb 16 2008, 05:11 PM

There is no such thing as a safe registry cleaner. There are many good ones but you have to understand what you are removing which means you need to take the time to review everything a cleaner wants to delete.

My preferred cleaner is RegSeeker. If you use it's Registry cleaner tool and delete only the Green items, that's about as safe as these tools get.

Why do you want to clean the registry? It will not provide any performance benefit. It's mostly a "feel good" tool Make you (me) feel better but doesn't really make any difference.

ya it was mostly for performance..coz ive heard useless/corrupted reg files can hinder performance

It's like defragging a NTFS partition. Makes the user feel good but provides no real performance improvement.

lol you mean defrag doesnt ACTUALLY do anything either really?

Nope, though there are many people who will disagree.

I wish I had the links to some of the benchmark studies I read a few years ago about defragging NTFS partitions. All I remember is the bottom line which said net gain was not discernible by a human being.

After saying that, I still defrag my Web Server twice a year because it makes me feel better. I actually have it scheduled to run on 5 different nights at 3AM (I have 5 partitions) in January and July, since this is easy to do on a system that runs 24x7.

This post has been edited by Ztruker: Feb 18 2008, 02:10 PM

I have to disagree ... I have seen benchmarking on drives before and after defragging..it does help...I will try to track the links to some of the benchmark studies..
Fragmentation is an issue for hard drives because they are mechanical devices with seek times . If you could reduce the seek time of a hard drive to zero, there would be no need to defrag the drive, because every sector of the drive would take just as long to read, so the performance improvement of rearranging the sectors would be zero. In a mechanical drive this will never happen, simply because the laws of physics tell us that any object with mass and velocity requires time to reach its destination, and time to change course.
with that said..but defragging your flash drive makes no sense at all....it will shorten the life of your flash drive...
Flash Drives have a limited lifespan... typically 100,000-300,000 writes. There is no restriction on the number of times you can read the drive, just write to it....

one link is here..
I have printed out a case study on benchmarking done a few years back that really shows the results..it showed a 30% speed increase but I have no idea whats happened to it ...YET ... I will try to track it down..

the attached pdf is from tests done by NSTL...it shows 17% all the way up to 80% speed increases
NSTL is the leading independent hardware and software testing organization in the microcomputer industry, dedicated to providing high quality services and test tools to the PC community. NSTL has extensive experience developing and conducting objective tests to assess new and existing products for compatibility, performance, usability, acceptance

This post has been edited by happyrck: Feb 18 2008, 07:40 PM

Thanks for the pdf file. It never said what the actual computer setups were though. Were they run on XP systems using the NTFS file system or FAT/FAT32? Sounded more like a FAT/FAT32 setup.

Also, it talks about defragging the page file, which a standard disk defrag doesn't do or doesn't do well. There are programs available that will defrag the page file, I think I even ran one a few times to see what it would do.

you can get the pagedefrag here...
I read up extensively on defragging about 4 years ago...there is a really well written detailed explanation with REPETEABLE results (benchmarking) I saved it and printed it out...I have got to find it...I am sure that after reading it you would change your mind on the benefits of defragging..

Okay, thanks. Hope you find it as I would like to read it.