Don’t Download a Registry Cleaner Without Reading This

I’ve been skeptical of the whole registry repair industry for some time. I didn’t consider myself to be a computer guru but friends that I had talked to suggested that the programs really didn’t do much to improve the performance of your computer.

I decided to test the theory that registry repair utilities were a waste of money. I bought three of the top programs, as ranked by the different review websites online, and decided to run a detailed registry cleaner comparison. My tests wouldn’t just be based on reading the features of the program to determine which was best. Rather I’d run each program through a set of tests to determine which one improve the performance of my PC, if at all, the most.

Some Surprises

One thing that happened, which I didn’t expect was the vast difference in the number of errors found by each program. I would assume that a registry error, is a registry error, is a registry error. How ever it appears not to be so. There was about a 200 item difference between the cleaner that found the most errors and that which found the least.

The second surprise I found was that none of the the programs I compared actually made as many actual changes to the registry as the number of errors found. This left me wondering, how exact the scan in these programs was.

PC Improvements

I can safely say that after running my entire comparison some registry cleaners did improve PC speed and performance, although not by a huge margin. The best registry repair program I tried improved the start-up time of Windows® by about 30% and based on bench mark testing improve the performance of my system by about 15%.

These aren’t huge changes by any means but for the $20-$30 bucks these software utilities cost it could be worth it if you drive yourself nuts with slow boot times or sluggish programs.