Do You Think Registry Cleaners Truly Essential?

By Jose Watinks

There is a lot of controversy over whether registry cleaners are necessary programs for the optimal performance of your personal computer. Some reviewers claim that they will get your sluggish computer back up to speed quickly. Others say that they are completely unnecessary, and can even cause your system to malfunction or crash.

What a registry cleaner does is scan the computer registry for invalid or corrupt files and unused or outdated drivers, look for missing file associations and remove any problems it encounters. In theory, you will have a quicker loading computer, with programs running faster and smoother. Is this really true, and can these types of programs fulfill their promises? Do they do all this automatically, or do they give you the option of choosing the right actions?

Some experts claim that using a cleaner for your registry is a dangerous step. It can remove files that are actually necessary, such as DLL files, causing your system to crash or programs to malfunction. At best, they see the use of a cleaner gaining a bit of disk space and possible speedier start-up. Most computers today have enough disk space that the possible gain of a few kilobytes is irrelevant. One reviewer has even gone to the extent of calling registry cleaning programs 'snake oil'.

Questions arise about the information that free trials of cleaner give. Possibly, once you have been told you have hundreds of errors in your registry affecting performance, you are going to want to buy the program that can clean that 'mess' up. You may just find, instead, that you have now lost some necessary files and the functionality is impaired. You may even find that the computer speed has slowed because the registry has been fragmented.

Keeping your registry clean, program developers claim, will require scheduled maintenance. What they don't say is that a few orphaned files or extra entries in the registry of your computer will not noticeably affect its functioning. You may even notice that the cleaner has marked and isolated needed files, labeled them as bad, and made them dysfunctional or removed them.

Computer experts agree that if you think you are having problems with your registry files, you should deal with them manually. If you don't know how, hire an expert or just leave it alone. Unless cleaning programs can come up with some hard data to back up their claims, you should avoid them.

Instead, to avoid problems, install only licensed programs to your system, and keep them up to date. Back up your critical data regularly. Be very cautious about installing and uninstalling trial or beta software programs. Always have a good anti-virus and malaware system running, and keep its files updated. Regularly defragment your system and delete temporary files. Just these simple stems will keep your system cleaner, and you won't need to consider the dilemma of whether or not to use registry cleaners.

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