There is no need to clean the registry. If you want the best use Ccleaner, but not the registry portion. Any changes made to the registry by 3rd party software can cause problems.
Short, to the point, conveys the essential information. The perfect post.
Actually, it is far from perfect as it suggests changes made by Windows own Registry Editor is safe, and it is far from it.
Fair enough.
And it suggests just because a program "can" cause problems, it will and so it should be avoided. And finally, it implies all Registry cleaners are equal - and equally bad.
Why would any reputable company produce a reckless program - as is suggested here? How could a company maintain such a stellar reputation for fine products and stay in business for 10+ years, if their flagship program was such a risk?
They kind of are. Think about it for just a half second. How many programs are there for Windows? Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands? Millions? More? How many of those will make changes to the registry? Probably virtually all of them. It's simply not plausible that any company, even Microsoft, could possibly keep track of every single possible change every single possible program might make. So that leaves using some kind of algorithmic means if one wants to "clean" the registry. Maybe I missed the memo, but I've never seen any developer of a registry cleaner come out and say here are the basic selection criteria we use. AV companies do this, providing rather detailed information on each virus their program detects and removes, showing how the company profiles the behavior of the program. Registry cleaner programs, to the best of my knowledge, use some secret sauce style method that they never elaborate on.
Setting that all aside, as anyone with programming experience will tell you, get a large enough data set, which can't be screened ahead of time, and any algorithmic method will result in some false positives. Absolutely cannot be helped short of building in an exception for every single possible exception and then you're not really taking an algorithmic approach, are you?
So not only are we expected to trust some developer's word when all we have is a black box that could be doing anything. While the best case scenario would be one of them offering up the full source code, I'd settle for at least an explanation of the methodology being used a la what AV companies have been doing for decades.
Then we get to how leftover bits of old programs in the registry will so rarely cause a problem there's essentially no point in removing them. Not only that, the amount of disk space and memory you save is measured in bytes, as in one step above a bit, the fundamental unit of measure for computers. It takes 1024 bytes to make a kilobyte, 1024 kilobytes to make a megabyte, 1024 megabytes to make a gigabyte, etc. So we're talking 5 orders of magnitude below what we normally think of for disk space and memory.
What you end up with is a program that is, at best, completely unnecessary, and at worst, likely to cause problems by incorrectly removing something.
ANY program that writes to your disk can cause problems - especially programs that manipulate files on the disk. And that includes a lot more than Registry cleaners.
Very true, but not seeing how that's in any way relevant to your point. If anything it seems to argue AGAINST your thesis. The more times something is writing/manipulating files the more chances there are for something to go wrong. So better to leave harmless bits of flotsam in the registry rather than roll the dice on that being the one time something goes horribly wrong.
I've used CCleaner, including the Registry cleaner, for many years on literally 100s of computers and NEVER had it cause any problems. It is not rational to assume all Registry cleaners are equal, or that problems caused by Registry cleaners in ancient days still apply today - ESPECIALLY a cleaner developed by a company that has well over 10 years of history for NOT breaking computers with their flagship product. Are there exceptions? Of course! But there are 10s, if not 100s of millions of CCleaner users who have used it without problems.
Statistically speaking, your sample size means nothing. Granted it's a fair sight better than people who say they've only used it on their one personal computer without issue, but you're not even a drop in the bucket. And CCleaner has left a trail of destruction just like every other program that does similar things. It started out life as a precision tool for professionals who knew what each option was and what it did. Then some moron trying to win an e-penis measuring contest "discovered" it. Not to be outdone, other idiots who aren't half as clever as they fancy themselves to be all jump on the bandwagon. Have to prove your e-penis is at least as big as the next person's after all. While I can't really blame the CCleaner developers for responding to what this new influx of users wanted, I still wish they would have stuck to their roots and maintained CCleaner as something of a bare metal tool with an absolute minimum of safety measures because the assumption is you know what you're doing and are prepared to deal with the consequences of your actions in a mature and responsible way.
I would MUCH RATHER inexperienced users use CCleaner - which is (1) not over-aggressive and (2) always prompts to backup the Registry before making changes - than go digging around with Regedit which makes changes in real-time with no un-do capability and no cues to the user to backup first. And FTR, CCleaner's Registry cleaner is the only Registry cleaner I recommend, though the one from Comodo (another reputable company that would not foolishly create a reckless program that breaks computers) works well too.
Personally, I prefer people who aren't professional developers or debuggers just forget they ever heard of the registry. Rarely is there a reason for anyone else to be mucking about in there. If I were still doing tech support for a living, I'd be encouraging people to use registry cleaners right and left, because it would ensure that my services would continue to be needed, but I don't, so I don't.
I do not recommend the use of any product that promises to make a computer perform "better than new". And I NEVER use or recommend the use of CCleaner's Registry cleaner to "fix" a broken Windows. I only use it for "preventative maintenance" to keep Windows in good working order.
I'm certainly all for preventive maintenance, but in this case there's nothing to prevent. The registry is a database, plain and simple. Extra data in a database is not something to be overly concerned about. Sure it takes up a little extra disk space, but that's about the extent of it. Since at most we'd be talking a couple MB of disk space, there's a lot of risk for essentially no reward.