Why Do Registry Cleaners Still Exist?

[Michael McAllister]

In my experience, registry cleaners cause more problems than they purport to fix.  Unfortunately, I've seen YouTube videos from IT experts that still recommend using CCleaner.  To be fair, if hardware or networking is your field of expertise, you might not spend enough time in front of consumer software to unearth these issues.

 

Up until a few years ago, I used registry cleaning products from Norton and Revo Uninstaller.  I've heard people talk about how good CCleaner is and I'm not impressed.  As the go-to techie in the family, I try my best to provide accurate diagnostics.  On a couple of different occasions that I can remember, using Revo Uninstaller resulted in a DLL error during startup on a family member's computer.  I've never had a registry cleaner completely brick a computer, but if the goal is to fix a particular issue, DLL errors are the exact opposite of what you want.

 

To perform a test, I fired up my VM and downloaded CCleaner.  Note that this is a fresh install of Windows 10.  It's a 90-evaluation copy for testing.  Here are the results of my initial scan:

 

 

What concerns me is that the .NET Framework is tied into many different programs so it's entirely possible that deleting these could result in unintended issues down the line.

[ThinkWithPortals]

I believe registry cleaners are total crap. Even Microsoft condemns their use, they said in a statement that they don't improve performance and can damage the registry so don't use them. https://blog.malwarebytes.com/cybercrime/2015/06/digital-snake-oil/

 

Recently when my father asked me to do some stuff on his PC I saw a snake-oil registry cleaner, looked at him with my hardest "I thought I taught you better than this" look, and uninstalled it.

[OPSJono]

1 minute ago, ThinkWithPortals said:

I believe registry cleaners are total crap. Even Microsoft condemns their use, they said in a statement that they don't improve performance and can damage the registry so don't use them. https://blog.malwarebytes.com/cybercrime/2015/06/digital-snake-oil/

 

Recently when my father asked me to do some stuff on his PC I saw a snake-oil registry cleaner, looked at him with my hardest "I thought I taught you better than this" look, and uninstalled it.

Yep.

 

This.

 

Most of the ones I've ever seen have actually been a virus and/or advert on a random site.

 

Strange to still see one in something like CCleaner

[vorticalbox]

missing shared dll, unused file extensions seem safe enough to remove. I mean if something is missing or unused then its just taking up space.

 

I've never had any problems fixed by cleaning the registry or had a problem caused by it.

 

the uninstaller you mentioned I do like for clearing out left over files, not had a problem with that either.

 

now I've not seen any benefits to cleaning it but a cleaner one has ti be better right? I'm not sure how we could go about testing it.

[ThinkWithPortals]

Just now, vorticalbox said:

missing shared dll, unused file extensions seem safe enough to remove. I mean if something is missing or unused then its just taking up space.

 

I've never had any problems fixed by cleaning the registry or had a problem caused by it.

 

the uninstaller you mentioned I do like for clearing out left over files, not had a problem with that either.

 

now I've not seen any benefits to cleaning it but a cleaner one has ti be better right? I'm not sure how we could go about testing it.

They mainly work off the placebo effect. You know, if a piece of software tells you that your registry is unclean, a progress bar fills up and then it tells you that they registry is now clean, you perceive the PC to be faster even though it probably isn't.

A lot of the "Registry Cleaners" on the market are straight-up malware. They might tell you that the registry is clean, but a fair amount of them also present pop-up ads or collect user info. More harm than good, really.

[Murasaki]

Cleaning the regs is okay but all that balony about your system being slow or unresponsive is total bs. Especially with SSDs nowadays even.

 

The OS processes over thousands of registry calls a second. It's not going to affect shite.

[kameshss]

Actually I thought those Registry Cleaners was crap.

 

But I tried Auslogics Boost Speed. They're pretty good. They brought lot of registry errors after Clean Installation. But I cleaned them anyway. No problem occured so far.

 

Only one time, I got some random Registry Cleaner (I don't remember the name). It corrupted my Windows 8 Start Menu.

 

After Windows 10 update, I searched for some good ones. Found out that Auslogics Boost Speed did pretty good job. I'm using it.

[Michael McAllister]

2 minutes ago, vorticalbox said:

missing shared dll, unused file extensions seem safe enough to remove. I mean if something is missing or unused then its just taking up space.

 

I've never had any problems fixed by cleaning the registry or had a problem caused by it.

 

the uninstaller you mentioned I do like for clearing out left over files, not had a problem with that either.

 

now I've not seen any benefits to cleaning it but a cleaner one has ti be better right? I'm not sure how we could go about testing it.

 

 

You can test it in a virtual machine.  I have a couple of snapshots I created before installing CCleaner.  Given the results of the initial scan, I can already tell that it is snake oil.  I can do further testing to see if it will break anything, as a lot of people seem to swear by CCleaner.

[BrightCandle]

The registry does just grow unbounded over time. Microsoft long ago stopped more entries causing performance problems so you don't need to recover the space for performance but over the years it can get filled with a lot of junk. The basic rule is if you don't have an issue don't mess with it.

[VerticalDiscussions]

Ah thats funny, im yet to experience any problem with using ccleaner (curse this fellah for deleting my browser cookies if its closed) but other than that i really just click, click and let it go. Ccleaner is still a top cleaning utility, i guess this a hit or miss cause in the end...

 

Dont they at least organize the resgitry in a proper way? Youd think Piriform would have some experience advantage over others to ensure your not cursed by Microsoft or repeated failures of the past.

[Nexxus]

ive repeatedly had them help out an older windows installation and make it speed up.

I Used to have an old laptop, ut was a windows 98 system that was upgraded to XP that machine was notorious for taking 30+ minutes to get it in a workable state.

I got a gaming system and found out about ccleaner and all that, ran a registry cleaner on it when I was noticing some slow starting up, and it fixed things up, decided to try it on the old laptop, after running it and cleaning shit up, its boot wrong from an agonizing half hour to a reasonable 8 minutes...literally nothing else done to it. So yeah im quite confident it did something in windows xp and windows 7 dunno about 8 and 10 but I still use it without ever having any issues come up once while using the tool.

[themctipers]

well it works for ios.

icleaner is fucking great. (jailbreak -- cydia only, app store is fake snake oil)

[WkdPaul]

4 hours ago, vorticalbox said:

I mean if something is missing or unused then its just taking up space.

You're aware that registry keys are just "values", the biggest key in a registry is usually around 50KB ... that's 0,05MB.

 

Unsued registry keys don't slow down computers, that's not how the registry works.

[vorticalbox]

14 minutes ago, wkdpaul said:

You're aware that registry keys are just "values", the biggest key in a registry is usually around 50KB ... that's 0,05MB.

 

Unsued registry keys don't slow down computers, that's not how the registry works.

every little helps also I never actually said they slow it down, I did say that I've seen no benefit.

 

errors could cause a number of issues, not sure CCleaner can actually detect error or if it just looks for empty, unused keys.

[Michael McAllister]

6 hours ago, vorticalbox said:

every little helps also I never actually said they slow it down, I did say that I've seen no benefit.

 

errors could cause a number of issues, not sure CCleaner can actually detect error or if it just looks for empty, unused keys.

2

 

Windows has built-in cleaning tools that can actually provide a positive outcome.  Even security experts don't touch the registry unless there are specific keys that need changing.  Software naturally isn't perfect.  Considering how powerful modern computers are, is it really worth the potential headache?