Registry Cleaners

[TomH]

A couple friends of mine are trying to sell me on the idea of a registry cleaner to speed up my laptop... a desirable goal, by the way. However, in doing some research, I'm finding precious little information on these programs. Plus, the "reviews" sites concern me as they seem to be either pandering to or are simply sourced from the software authors or their shills.

So... I'm wondering if anyone here has direct experience with any of these programs, and what your results were. THANKS in advance for any input.

 

[MarkK]

I find it very hard to believe that a bloated registry causes a machine to run slowly. The registry is a tree structure, so referencing a path should be extremely fast. Yeah, a full text search of the registry is slow, but no software uses the registry that way. A registry consumer knows the path in advance, and typically a registry consumer reads what it needs for configuration purposes, but once configured doesn't need to do a lot of reads or writes from the registry.
My belief is that those cleaners are software snake oil, but you could test it too, like find a registry API and read or write from or to the registry from VBA a few thousand times and see how long it takes.
Here's some timings you can run . . .

Private Sub Test139640()
    Const MAX As Long = 10000
    Dim clock As Single
    Dim i As Long
    Dim var
    
[COLOR="Green"]    ' create a registry setting[/COLOR]
    SaveSetting "MyApp", "MyTest", "Testing", 0
[COLOR="Green"]    'start timer[/COLOR]
    clock = Timer
[COLOR="Green"]    'run test[/COLOR]
    For i = 0 To MAX
[COLOR="Green"]        'save the setting
        'SaveSetting "MyApp", "MyTest", "Testing", i
        'retreive the setting[/COLOR]
        var = GetSetting("MyApp", "MyTest", "Testing")
    Next
[COLOR="Green"]    'stop timer[/COLOR]
    Beep
    Debug.Print Format(Timer - clock, "0.000") & " secs"
[COLOR="Green"]    'delete the registry setting[/COLOR]
    DeleteSetting "MyApp", "MyTest"
    
End Sub

I commented the SaveSetting out of the loop, and on my slow machine I can read the registry 10,000 times in 0.12 of a sec, so that's pretty fast, it seems to me.
I have a lot of doubts about the need for registry cleaners.

 

[Galaxiom]

Those who sell registry cleaners are relying on the ingnorance of the average user about the registry.

Those who think it makes any real difference are trying to avoid facing the fact that they wasted their money.

 

[TomH]

Those who sell registry cleaners are relying on the ingnorance of the average user about the registry.

Those who think it makes any real difference are trying to avoid facing the fact that they wasted their money.

Galaxiom: Thanks for the input. My feeling has been that if the registry cleaners were truly so great, we'd see much more on them in the popular industry magazines and online articles. What I found was a number of opinion pieces that, surpirsingly, all sounded alike and came to similar conclusions. I couldn't find any significant inputs from sources I would call "independent." To me, that is a real red flag.

Thanks to lagbolt for the code. I'm sorry to say I don't have the knowledge required to execute it myself.

Now... a follow-up question would be this: I use Trend Micro Titanium Internet Security as a firewall. I've noticed a significant slowdown in performance and speed, and doing a little investigation found that a common problem exists with a Trend Micro file called coreserviceshell.exe. Online forums reveal this thing is a memory hog, and many others have had similar problems. I went through the TM hotfix, but am still having trouble. I am considering changing to another firewall program, but have no idea on how to choose one. Any advice is appreciated.

If I need, I'll open another thread on this question... I don't want to deflect too far astray from my original issue.

Thanks again!!