SOLVED is registry defragging necessary?

[catilley1092]

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?

 

[Nibiru2012]

I have used them and they have improved my start-up and shut-down times.

Haha... fooled y'all!!

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

 

[catilley1092]

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.

 

[davehc]

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.

 

[Thrax]

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.

 

[catilley1092]

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.

 

[clifford_cooley]

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.

 

[Core]

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.

 

[kristain]

RE

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.

 

[davehc]

That looks like a quote from here:

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

Who make money from selling the appropriate software.

 

[catilley1092]

I clicked onto that site, and WOT (a FF add on), reported it as unreliable. I went no further. But I don't know how that defragging a registry builds a brand new one from the old one. The only way that I know how to build a new registry is to reinstall your OS from scratch.

 

[MykJay]

Just be careful with the program you use to do it

I know this is "solved" and aging, but I wanted to add my 2 cents. Especially since this showed up on my Google search results and I wasn't happy with the answer.

As long as you have system restore enabled, there is no real danger in letting a program defrag your registry hives.

Just a note on how defraggler "builds a new copy" of the registry. They probably mean to say that they make a copy of the current registry hives as contiguous non-fragmented files and then mark them for being renamed on reboot so as to replace the current, fragmented version of the registry hives.

I wouldn't recommend defraggler.

However, I have seen computers that experienced large performance increases due to registry and page file defragmenting.

In those particular cases, the registry hives and page file were highly fragmented because at one point the hard drive had nearly filled to capacity (leaving fragmented pieces of free space) and the page file and registry hives started to take use fragmented pieces of free space as they grew in size. (The page file size wasn't a static size on these PCs)

For Windows XP I would highly recommend this little piece of freeware:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897426.aspx

It has worked well for me for a long time. I have installed it on many of my client's computers.

I haven't had any trouble with a Windows 7 computer slowing down due to fragmentation yet (the built-in scheduled defrag tool helps). However, this looks like a good piece of compatible (free) software (although please note that I haven't tried it yet):
http://ultradefrag.sourceforge.net/

Thanks!
-Myk

 

[greentech07]

Registry def ragging cleans ur registry, it increases some speed of ur pc, it arrange the registry keys , u can do it to icrase some speed of ur pc reginout may help u

 

[Nibiru2012]

@ greentech07 -

u can do it to icrase some speed of ur pc reginout may help u

Do you work for RegInOut? It seems that in every post you do that you tell people to use this application.

It's almost as if you're spamming about this. What's up with that?

Are you related to the member "sunnyrepairs" or the same person under a different moniker?

 

[greentech07]

yeah i have used it so that's why i'm telling about that, there is no other reason

 

[Kalario]

Good catch Nibs!!!

C_C watch out