Windows Tools, Help & Guides

Though CCleaner may be a good registry cleaner, it ended up doing something peculiar to my laptop when I had Vista on it. I’m not sure why, but it deleted my volume and accelerator icons in my task bar (meaning I could no longer adjust my volume or view my accelerator speed). I had made a restore point before I used CCleaner, and it was a good thing I did because I was able to restore my laptop to an earlier point.

However, I had a problem using monthly backup when it came time to do just that. I, thought, at first that an automatic security update I had taken might have caused the problem, but I really couldn’t be sure of that because it wasn’t but a week after using CCleaner when it was time to do the monthly backup. It is a possibility that the CCleaner could have also deleted a file that had to do with user permissions when trying to do monthly backups. The error message I would receive referred to me not having administrative permissions.

Since I didn’t know exactly how to fix the problem, I allowed a Vista tech from Microsoft to go into my laptop and work on it. He meant well, but deleted a hotfix in my Windows file for Software Distribution thinking that would clear up the problem of doing monthly backups. Instead, it made matter worse and I was no longer able to take automatic updates or perform a complete system restore. It corrupted my software distribution files denying me permissions with UAC as administrator of my own laptop. I ended up having to get a Dell tech to help me and we had to reformat my laptop.

I did some research about registry cleaners, and from what I’ve read, they have good points and bad points. I found what I read to be very interesting and I found the information at Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registry_cleaner

I found this under the “Disadvantages” of using a Registry Cleaner. This is just one of the disadvantages that are listed:

Marginal performance benefit:
“On Windows 9x computers, it is possible that a very large registry could slow down the computer’s startup time. However this is far less of an issue with NT-based Operating Systems (including Windows XP and Vista) due to a different on-disk structure of the registry, improved memory management and indexing. Slowdown due to registry bloat is thus far less of an issue in modern versions of Windows. More importantly, however, the difference in speed due to the use of a registry cleaner is negligible: rarely do they remove more than a few kilobytes from the total size of the registry. In fact, technology journalist Ed Bott has claimed that no-one has ever successfully managed to measure any significant performance increase from the use of a registry cleaner. Any potential user of a registry cleaner must thus balance a probably negligible performance increase against the possibility of system instability. A safer and more measurable approach to Registry performance is to defragment the Registry files using a Microsoft-supported tool such as PageDefrag.”

Regarding defragment, I’ve found that my laptop is always faster after doing a defragment and I think that’s much safer IMO. I’ve made it a habit to to defrag on a regular basis.

I know and realize that others have had better experiences that I’ve had with registry cleaners such as CCleaner. I’ve made the decision not to use them. But if others decide to use a registry cleaner, just make sure you creat a restore point and also backup your registry as Rich has suggested.

Though CCleaner may be a good registry cleaner, it ended up doing something peculiar to my laptop when I had Vista on it. I’m not sure why, but it deleted my volume and accelerator icons in my task bar (meaning I could no longer adjust my volume or view my accelerator speed). I had made a restore point before I used CCleaner, and it was a good thing I did because I was able to restore my laptop to an earlier point.

However, I had a problem using monthly backup when it came time to do just that. I, thought, at first that an automatic security update I had taken might have caused the problem, but I really couldn’t be sure of that because it wasn’t but a week after using CCleaner when it was time to do the monthly backup. It is a possibility that the CCleaner could have also deleted a file that had to do with user permissions when trying to do monthly backups. The error message I would receive referred to me not having administrative permissions.

Since I didn’t know exactly how to fix the problem, I allowed a Vista tech from Microsoft to go into my laptop and work on it. He meant well, but deleted a hotfix in my Windows file for Software Distribution thinking that would clear up the problem of doing monthly backups. Instead, it made matter worse and I was no longer able to take automatic updates or perform a complete system restore. It corrupted my software distribution files denying me permissions with UAC as administrator of my own laptop. I ended up having to get a Dell tech to help me and we had to reformat my laptop.

I did some research about registry cleaners, and from what I’ve read, they have good points and bad points. I found what I read to be very interesting and I found the information at Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registry_cleaner

I found this under the “Disadvantages” of using a Registry Cleaner. This is just one of the disadvantages that are listed:

Marginal performance benefit:
“On Windows 9x computers, it is possible that a very large registry could slow down the computer’s startup time. However this is far less of an issue with NT-based Operating Systems (including Windows XP and Vista) due to a different on-disk structure of the registry, improved memory management and indexing. Slowdown due to registry bloat is thus far less of an issue in modern versions of Windows. More importantly, however, the difference in speed due to the use of a registry cleaner is negligible: rarely do they remove more than a few kilobytes from the total size of the registry. In fact, technology journalist Ed Bott has claimed that no-one has ever successfully managed to measure any significant performance increase from the use of a registry cleaner. Any potential user of a registry cleaner must thus balance a probably negligible performance increase against the possibility of system instability. A safer and more measurable approach to Registry performance is to defragment the Registry files using a Microsoft-supported tool such as PageDefrag.”

Regarding defragment, I’ve found that my laptop is always faster after doing a defragment and I think that’s much safer IMO. I’ve made it a habit to to defrag on a regular basis.

I know and realize that others have had better experiences that I’ve had with registry cleaners such as CCleaner. I’ve made the decision not to use them. But if others decide to use a registry cleaner, just make sure you creat a restore point and also backup your registry as Rich has suggested.

Thanks for sharing your experience Angie. I hope people can recover from any issues they have by following your example.