Cleaning a Registry (W10).

[Cheesegear]

So apparently my registry has a lot of...Stuff...I've run two Anti-viruses through it, and Windows Defender, and everything's fine (AFAIK).

The Microsoft/Windows forums advice is that I should definitely not touch the Registry at all, ever, and that 'all Registry Cleaning software is 'snake-oil'', unquote.

I can't seem to find a Windows program that cleans the Registry. Maybe I'm just not looking hard enough, or Windows has called it something dumb, and I'm just bad at knowing what to look for.
So, how do I 'clean' my Registry? Back up all my important files and just re-install?

[Excession]

The Microsoft/Windows forums advice is that I should definitely not touch the Registry at all, ever, and that 'all Registry Cleaning software is 'snake-oil'', unquote.

This advice is correct in general. Why do you feel you need to do this?

Edit: W10 does provide a reset option that can uninstall everything, and return settings to their default values without deleting all your files. Described here (https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/reset-windows-10-pc).

[factotum]

I agree with Excession. There's a lot of FUD spread about cleaning the Registry of unused entries etc., but I've never found it to be necessary myself.

[Excession]

I agree with Excession. There's a lot of FUD spread about cleaning the Registry of unused entries etc., but I've never found it to be necessary myself.

I think it used to be a useful thing to do under Windows 95/98, as the registry database format meant it got slower the more stuff there was in there. That was fixed ages ago though, maybe in Windows 2000 or XP, by switching to a better database format.

[lesser_minion]

I'm fairly sure that looking through a registry or file system is done in logarithmic time (which is less cool than it sounds), so having lots of extra cruft in the registry will only have a very small effect on overall performance.

There are some maintenance tasks that can be useful, such as defragmenting, but all modern Windows machines will take care of that automatically. The tools you can buy to help out are usually placebos at best.

[Drumbum42]

Yea, using tools to clean your registry is can be dangerous to the stability of your computer. Reading notes and papers by Current/Ex Microsoft employees the registry is problematic for even Microsoft to edit. There's so many windows versions, deprecation changes, patches, and legacy things that need to be maintained that it is almost impossible for 3rd party software to modify it without damaging it slightly. Most of these tools will slowly corrupt your Registry.

NOTE: This is as of XP-Win7. I can't say much about windows 10, so this may be slightly dated, but the registry wasn't the most stable thing and could start falling over if you poke it too much with 3rd party tools. As with all iterated OS's, it's probably better now, but I have no data to back that up.


I'm fairly sure that looking through a registry or file system is done in logarithmic time (which is less cool than it sounds), so having lots of extra cruft in the registry will only have a very small effect on overall performance..

Soo... I thought your were saying log(n) was not cool(efficient) and did a big write up. That I re-read that and yea, you're right, unused 'junk' won't really slow anything down.

And yes, I want to say that NTFS uses a B-Tree index. So it should have log(n) for search and insert, which is a pretty good middle ground.

[factotum]

And yes, I want to say that NTFS uses a B-Tree index. So it should have log(n) for search and insert, which is a pretty good middle ground.

Just because NTFS uses it doesn't mean the Registry does--the Registry is a monolithic binary file, so the file system it's running on doesn't change how it works. You're probably correct in the Registry using something similar, though, it wouldn't make any sense otherwise.

[Cheesegear]

Yea, using tools to clean your registry is can be dangerous to the stability of your computer. Reading notes and papers by Current/Ex Microsoft employees the registry is problematic for even Microsoft to edit. There's so many windows versions, deprecation changes, patches, and legacy things that need to be maintained that it is almost impossible for 3rd party software to modify it without damaging it slightly. Most of these tools will slowly corrupt your Registry.

That is pretty much what I read.

Thanks, thread.

[spinningdice]

I'm fairly sure that looking through a registry or file system is done in logarithmic time (which is less cool than it sounds), so having lots of extra cruft in the registry will only have a very small effect on overall performance.

There are some maintenance tasks that can be useful, such as defragmenting, but all modern Windows machines will take care of that automatically. The tools you can buy to help out are usually placebos at best.

Just in case you're not aware don't defrag a SSD hard drive, it's not only completely unnecessary it actually shortens the lifespan of your drive.

On the original comment, I do some minor reg editing to fix issues, but it's just not worth trying to "clean" it. If you're having general performance issues it's unlikely the registry is contributing much to it. I work in IT Support and we have more issues caused by registry cleaning software than fixes by using it.

Only registry keys I'd be tempted to look at are HKCU & HKLM\software\microsoft\windows\currentversion\run , which gives you the programs that load on startup. These can slow down your bootup sequence.