by Stephen B.

Created on: May 22, 2010

After just one search of "registry cleaner" on Google you will end up with over five million results.  After sifting through the first few pages you will find most of the links are registry cleaning products and that these products are made of magic that can speed up your computer and stop it from freezing and crashing.  The registry of a computer is something that most users do not even know exists, or what exactly it is even if they have heard of it.  Unfortunately, most software that claims to give you big gains on performance is probably to good to be true, especially since many of these products are available for free.

Just to shed a little light on what the registry is and what it does, here is a little background.  In the old days all applications used a text-based configuration file for the program's settings.  The Windows Registry solved this problem by allowing all the settings for all the applications to be stored in one place.  So, all the stuff that has setup by any software installed on a computer along with all the personal settings the user has input is stored in the registry.  Because all the settings are read by the computer as a numerical value, it is easy for manage it as a single database. It is also read into the systems RAM when the operating system is booted up, which allows the computer to access the data almost instantly.

The registry cleaner claims to correct errors and clean junk out of your registry to increase performance in your computer, and even though this is technically true the increase is unnoticeable.  CCleaner is on of the most popular utility programs on the internet and it comes equipped with a registry cleaner, and running it will probably show that there are a few errors in the registry.  The Windows Registry stored hundreds of thousands of files, yet there may be twenty or so errors at any given time.  The point being that cleaning twenty errors of a registry with that many files will not make a difference, but the risk that it is deleting something that is needed is much higher.  If something from a web browser or control panel is deleted the damage done may be worse than any file floating around. These files that are deleted can add up to a few kilobytes of data at most, which will not leave any computer performing better, so the reward does not out way the risk.

The claim that these products can help a computer run better usually come from the other features

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