[SOLVED] is registry defragging necessary?

I'm registered on the "Giveaway of the Day" site, and today's giveaway is a registry defraggler. Is it really necessary to defrag your registry? I once used a RAM defrag tool (from Glary Utilities) and it caused me to run short of RAM (in XP Pro), although I have 2GB of RAM installed on the laptop. Fortunately, I had created a restore point before installing this program, and I rolled back to before Glary was installed. And haven't messed with them since. But these programs, are they really useful, or more or less (potentially damaging) snake oil?

Haha... fooled y'all!!

Why don't you do some checking on the Bing or Ixquick search engines?

I have received several emails in the past offering similar programs, and I did research them. But opinions varied, some says it's unsafe, some says it's OK and some says do it at your risk. The reason I wonder is because if these type of programs are beneficial, why doesn't Windows include these tools with your OS? They do include a disc defragmenter and disc cleanup, but not these tools.

I have had the opposite experience to Nibiru.

I was a little apprehensive of using them at all. I then took the plunge and tried a couple. Using accurate timing, I could not detect any difference in the use of my computer.
I think the whole file is about 45 mbs, but it is dynamic, and expands to accept new installations etc.It is alsoo located in at least three different places. If that is correct, I cannot see defragmentation doing anything useful to it.

Defragging or cleaning the registry for improved performance is pure snake oil. The registry is such a small set of files that any performance gains can be measured in nanoseconds.

I had the feeling that would be the case with these programs. I've became very leery of these so called "free programs" that promise you huge performance gains. The only reason I still subscribe to the daily giveaway is that you can run across a good backup program, or something useful. Even then, I tryout the program(s) on XP, as I don't want to install garbage on my desktop.

Find you a good BootCD. They usually come with all types of stand alone applications that don't require installation. This alone would give you a good idea if any of the applications are worth anything.

Even if the application in question is not on the BootCD, there is probably one that is very similar and can be used to do the same function.

I would leave the registry well enough alone. Whatever small speed improvements you may get are, in my book, overshadowed by the much greater risk of something going wrong, and when something goes haywire with the registry it can be a while before you notice it, and when you do start noticing something you may end up doing a lot of troubleshooting before you even think to blame some changes you made to the registry weeks or months ago. It's just not worth fixing if it ain't already broken.

Registry defragger is necessary. It builds a brand new registry from the old one.
Improves System Response Time.
Improves Application response time.
Improves boot time.
Saves Memory as smaller registry consumes less memory.
Privacy Protector.
Removes the deleted data from the registry permanently.
Prevents the registry corruption.

That looks like a quote from here:

http://www.supportdock.com/registry-...optimizer.html

Who make money from selling the appropriate software.