{"id":131,"date":"2012-06-30T19:13:14","date_gmt":"2012-07-01T00:13:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/triplescomputers.com\/blog\/?p=131"},"modified":"2014-11-10T11:50:14","modified_gmt":"2014-11-10T16:50:14","slug":"the-dangers-of-registry-cleaners","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.triplescomputers.com\/blog\/casestudies\/the-dangers-of-registry-cleaners\/","title":{"rendered":"The dangers of registry cleaners"},"content":{"rendered":"

Update 2014:<\/strong> Microsoft has since finally posted their own take on the use of registry cleaners<\/a>, and it’s quite clear:<\/p>\n

Some products such as registry cleaning utilities suggest that the registry needs regular maintenance or cleaning.\u00a0 However, serious issues can occur when you modify the registry incorrectly using these types of utilities. These issues might require users to reinstall the operating system due to instability. Microsoft cannot guarantee that these problems can be solved without a reinstallation of the Operating System as the extent of the changes made by registry cleaning utilities varies from application to application.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Bottom line: don’t use registry cleaners, and view\u00a0any product or company which recommends that you do in a\u00a0rightfully suspicious light.<\/p>\n

(My\u00a0original post follows):<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

If you’re used to my work, you know how strongly against the use of any registry cleaners I am. \u00a0It’s no secret that many experts, including Windows guru Mark Russinovich, warn of their dangers. \u00a0The fundamental reason behind this position is that no program can know with certainty what is<\/em> and is not<\/em>\u00a0desired or necessary to be stored in the registry. \u00a0And plus, even if plenty of unnecessary stuff\u00a0is\u00a0<\/em>contained therein, it’s not really beneficial to remove it. \u00a0The registry as a whole is relatively small anyway compared with the amount of RAM available on modern PCs, and removing even a few thousand straggling values or keys provides very little, if any, performance improvement.<\/p>\n

So in light of this, today I’m here with an update regarding one of the most popular posts I’ve had on this blog to date, and I felt like it deserved its own post thanks to the magnitude of the example. \u00a0In my Click2Run Configuration Failure Office 2010 post<\/a>, I offer a solution to a fairly widespread and rather maddening issue with Office 2010 Click2Run installations suddenly failing. \u00a0Not even Microsoft has addressed the problem with an official solution to date, so this blog post has gotten plenty of traffic.<\/p>\n

One thing my post didn’t include, however, was a\u00a0known cause<\/em> for the problem. \u00a0Well, as with most computer problems, this error doesn’t just spontaneously appear. \u00a0It’s now become apparent to me that the culprit behind this problem is actually\u00a0registry cleaning applications<\/em>. \u00a0The most commonly seen program responsible for this problem appears to be iolo’s System Mechanic<\/strong>, but it’s safe to assume that any registry cleaner could lead to the same results. \u00a0<\/strong>For a long time now, I have been recommending against the use of this program and have removed it from many of my clients’ PCs following consultation with them regarding its use. \u00a0If you have System Mechanic installed and have been using it, you can expect that you might run into the same problem in the future.<\/p>\n

This is just an example, of course. \u00a0Although it’s now mostly certain that this is the predominant cause of this irritating Office 2010 problem, registry cleaners can just as easily lead to any number of other issues that are hard to diagnose and potentially impossible to troubleshoot. \u00a0Save yourself the headache and remove any registry cleaning program you may have installed from your PC today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Update 2014: Microsoft has since finally posted their own take on the use of registry cleaners, and it’s quite clear: Some products such as registry cleaning utilities suggest that the registry needs regular maintenance or cleaning.\u00a0 However, serious issues can … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,5],"tags":[109,8,108],"class_list":["post-131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-casestudies","category-everythingelse","tag-click2run","tag-registry","tag-registry-cleaners"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.triplescomputers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.triplescomputers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.triplescomputers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.triplescomputers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.triplescomputers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=131"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.triplescomputers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.triplescomputers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.triplescomputers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.triplescomputers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}