Which Windows Registry Cleaner Do You Recommend?

[phi144]

On Macs after most installs you will notice at the end of the install it says something to the effect of "Optimizing HD". Essentially this is defragging the drive. But to answer your question I never need to do any special disk cleanup up on my Mac or any of my Linux machines. Both Mac and Linux OS's keep new installs together unlike Windows which just looks for the next available space on the HD and writes to it.

[jay]

I don't know if they still do as a general rule, but years ago, the techs at the Apple Store Genius Bar would recommend running Disk Warrior to keep the system running in tip-top shape.

http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/

I have an older version, but haven't run it on my Macs in a long time.

[krygny]

Originally posted by phi144
... Hopefully someday Microsoft will abandon that practice.

[john802]

I use Registry Clean Expert on my desktop.

On a side note... if you use ccleaner
, there are three different version. The standard w/ yahoo toolbar, the slim w/ out yahoo toolbar & the portable w/out installer. I use the slim version (657kb) on my laptop.

[N_Jay]

Any Byte-heads out there want to tell us the pros and cons of an OS using or not using an architecture that relies on a Registry file?

[phi144]

Registry files are a single "DB" that lists all a computer's settings and program settings. Here is where all the changes happen that you see when you make a change to your account settings in Windows. I believe the agument from Microsoft was better security but we all know better than that. It is a single
point of failure and a choke point. Viruses become difficult to find when they populate multiple tables within the registry. From a programming perspective registry files make it more difficult to install and uninstall packages.

In Unix/Linux .config files are used per user. With most UNIX systems where config files are spread all over the place as each package needs,the chances of them all being corrupted at once is far far less.

Each software package developer(s) should have the freedom to create their config files in whatever (hopefully easily parseable/sourceable) format that they choose and not have to use some so-called "standard". Plus their config files are mostly plain text files you can fix/modify/
manage/admin easily.To have to go thru regedit to manage the locks just to edit and view the binary database called the
"registry" is a nightmare.

"The only argument that I have heard that vaguely makes sense to have such a single point of failure is "security". But security thru obscurity (a binary registry instead of plain text files?) has never worked anyway. And your phrase "info in the database could be more or less public" sure shoots down the security aspect anyway."

[krygny]

The interesting thing is, you can double-click on a .dat file (as in "Hmm, what's dat?") and unleash all manner of evil upon your computer.

WARNING: Don't do dat.