Registry Cleaners
Debunking a Myth
There’s a common belief that cleaning the registry will improve system performance. Almost every “performance enhancing” suite offers a registry cleaner. They work by removing orphaned registry entries (meaning they point nowhere), mainly with the intention of keeping the size of the registry hives to a minimum. A generous estimate puts the average length of a registry entry at probably about the same as a single line of text on a page. That’s roughly 100 bytes of data. A typical set of registry hives will usually be 50MB in size, which is ~50,000,000 bytes. They can get far bigger than that too. As you can see, even deleting a couple of hundred orphaned entries isn’t going to make a noticeable dent.
Registry cleaners can also damage the registry by incorrectly identifying essential registry entries as orphans. When this happens, the outcome is often detrimental to some component of Windows or to an installed program. In some cases, it can lead to corruption of the registry and Windows failing to load at all. When this happens, it can be a difficult and arduous task (at best) to find and fix the problem. A very good reason to leave the registry alone. As a side note, most sites that offer tweaks to the registry also come with a well-highlighted warning about the dangers of modifying the registry.
In short, registry cleaning does not provide any real performance gain and increase the odds of system instability. There are far safer and more effective ways of improving system performance.
Here’s some recommended reading on this topic:
Do I need a Registry Cleaner? – Bill Castner (Microsoft MVP)
Why I don’t use registry cleaners – Ed Bott (Microsoft MVP)
Registry Cleaner: Disadvantages – Wikipedia
Tags: registry
