Registry cleaners

[anon96701537]

Hi

I have heard i can use a registry cleaner to speed up my computer but another friend told me they usually contain viruses, are they recommended or no good?

 

[root]

Hi @anon96701537

I’ve never personally been a fan of registry cleaners and am somewhat skeptical of what they do. The registry contains thousands of settings and removing things from it is unlikely to make a huge difference.

At best they do nothing at at worst unfortunately your friend is right - a lot of these do contain malware, or they might remove critical parts of the registry that affect your computer or stop Windows running at all.

If you are looking to give Windows a general tune up the first place I would advise to check is your startup items - open Task Manager (ctrl+shift+esc), if there’s an option for More Details at the bottom, click on it.

Go to the start up tab and look at the apps listed here - any that you don’t need to start along with your computer, disable them, and if you don’t recognise them search online to see what they do or let us know here and we can advise

 

[Philtrum]

@root has offered some good advice - generally the advice is to leave the registry alone.

When I used windows I used to run CCleaner and previously recommended it to friends but it’s not such a good program.

These days I recommend BleachBit - it’s open source software which is always good and cleans temp files quite well on Windows without causing issues

 

[nerdtech]

i have also heard that ccleaner is bad see my other thread

 

[Susan]

Registry cleaners are as I’ve Found not something that give good results. Its a wasted effort to use them honestly its much better if you want to clean you temp files to execute run and enter temp and %temp% to open the temp file folders and del them instead. Much safer option for me and has worked out very well for me.