Please stop using registry cleaners, they’re harming your PC
Registry cleaners have been available for decades, and there was once an argument for using them. However, nowadays they have almost no benefit and could ruin your PC.
What do registry cleaners do to the Windows registry?
The Windows Registry is essentially a long list of settings. It specifies which options are enabled in Windows, what values certain settings take (like whether Windows is in light or dark mode), specifies where programs or resources can be found, and countless other things.
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You don’t have to tolerate small inconveniences.
When a program is added, new registry entries are created and old ones are often modified. After several years of use, it is not uncommon for the Windows registry to contain a bunch of old and unused registry entries from the various programs you have installed.
Generally speaking, registry cleaners scan the Windows registry for these abandoned registry keys in hopes of saving space and “increasing performance.”
However, even a massive registry left “uncleaned” for a few years will only be a few hundred megabytes in size. Since modern storage drives are measured in hundreds of gigabytes or even terabytes, wiping out a small fraction of the Windows registry (which starts out at a few hundred megabytes), there is no chance that cleaning the registry will make an appreciable difference in your available space.
Some programs will produce unusually large registry entries that can increase in size to a few gigabytes.
When older computers used mechanical hard drives as boot drives, it’s conceivable that a large registry could have slowed down a PC a bit. However, even SATA SSDs, which are much slower than their NVMe-based siblings, are not limited in the same way.
What Registry Cleaners Do Wrong
Due to the importance of the Windows registry in the stability of the operating system, deleting random items can seriously mess up your PC. In the worst case, it can even make it unstable or unusable, forcing you to use a registry backup.
This is where registry cleaners can cause problems. On more than one occasion, a registry cleaner got a little overzealous and started deleting registry entries it shouldn’t.
If it stops when deleting settings, it could just be an annoying inconvenience, but that’s not the case. It completely deleted registry entries related to programs I had installed, making them completely unusable until I reinstalled the program.
In the worst case, a registry cleaner could mistakenly delete a registry key related to something important to Windows. This is more likely to happen after a major Windows update. Depending on what it deletes, it could cause serious problems for your PC.
Considering the risks involved and the fact that there are little to no potential benefits in the modern era, it’s best to stay away from it altogether.
What should I do if I need to clean my registry?
In all likelihood, you don’t need to clean your registry. Unused and abandoned registry entries take up almost no space and normally do not interfere with the operation of your PC.
There is one notable exception that I have encountered: it occurs when an old registry entry for a program subsequently makes it impossible to reinstall the same program at a later date. This usually happens when you manually delete a program’s files rather than using an uninstaller, which should automatically clean the registry.
Either way, what you need in this situation is a registry scalpel, and a registry cleaner is more like a chainsaw.
If you have a program that won’t reinstall due to a problem with the registry, you need to open Registry Editor, use the search function to find places where this program exists in the registry, and then delete or modify it. only these entries.
Once you have done this, you should be able to reinstall the program without problems.
There are programs, like Revo Uninstaller, that can selectively clean traces of a program from the registry without having to go through it line by line.
I still recommend against Revo Uninstaller in general, as it shouldn’t be necessary. However, if you do certainly If you need to delete the remains of a program’s registry keys, this is an easier and probably safer approach than clearing the registry manually. It’s also less likely to cause problems than a general registry cleaner, as long as you don’t go wild on its most aggressive settings.
Registry cleaners are generally no longer useful and the risks they pose far outweigh their potential benefits, which are negligible. And remember, if you want to get rid of a program, use the uninstaller itself instead of just deleting it. This will reduce the number of random remaining registry keys.
