Windows Registry Question

[PUMP]

I have been using RegCure by Pareto Logic as a registry cleaner for about 2-years. It seems to me that RegCure is too agressive and often removes registry entries that are needed by infrequently used programs. Does anyone have experience with other registry cleaner software?

[Silver_2000]

All of the reg cleaner programs I have tried have at best scared me, at worst destroyed windows

I would stay away from them

The recommended way to clean your registry is to format and reinstall windows :evil

[kirkmears]

+1 on what Doug said. i personally use acronis for cleaning the registry (and everything else on the hard drive -backup/reimaging tool)

heres one reason why (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rootkit)

much spyware/malware is custom & handcrafted nowadays. these folks can recompile software with little effort and none of your tools would ever alert you of it.

once you get done reimaging the machine, say off the internet as much as possible while your installing all your applications & software. make sure all your stuff is patched & updated, do a full disk backup to a USB drive using a utility like ghost or acronis. just remember to check the box so it verifies your backup during that process

[PUMP]

I was afraid that there would not be a good answer. From a security point of view, I guess the easiest thing is to have one pc used only for internet surfing, one (or more) for getting things done and secure internet transactions. Neither of which addresses a reasonably easy way to maintain the windows registry.:hammer:

[SVTlightning87]

I use peer guardian to block ip's kind of like a IP ghost, and the only spyware and anti-virus I use is spy bot and avg, and there all free,and I can look at porn all day :icon_lol:

[PUMP]

I'm really not to worried about virus attacks. Mainly about keeping the registry clean of unneeded entries that slow down the OS. I use spybot, Avast antivirus, and Malwarebytes (all free) to weed out trojans and similar spyware. I also use the spybot tools to keep startup in good health. The problem with Windows XP (don't have enough experience with Vista to comment) is that registry entries are not always cross-linked sufficiently to allow deletion when programs are uninstalled. I can use spybot tools in combination with regedit to clean the registry, but it is tedious. I have used RegCure to reduce the upkeep effort and it works most of the time. It has undo/restore features to cover the uh-ohs. I was just wodering if there was something a little less aggresive. It's analogeous to useing 80-grit sandpaper where 400-grit is needed.

[Silver_2000]

Bob

If things are going well there is no need to have that kind of approach on the registry

If you want a totally clean solution and your PC will handle it run windows in a VM - virtual machine

Get the VM the way you like - take a snapshot then launch the VM and use the VM to surf etc - then when there is a problem or concern about the registry ( i dont spend much time worrying about the registry on the 5 PCs I keep up at home or the 1100 at work ) you can simply get rid of the damaged VM and launch a clean one from the snapshot

Windows 7 has the ability to run XP compatibility mode that runs in a similar way. if you have a program or hardware that doesn't run in Windows 7 you can launch it XP compatibility mode that launches an XP VM and runs the problem program in the XP sandbox

[PUMP]

Thanks Doug. Good answer. I don't know much about the VM thing, but I'll do some research and see if I can implement that approach.

[Silver_2000]

here are some links

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/

http://www.vmware.com/products/ws/aop.html

free version
http://www.virtualbox.org/ - never used it

I have a MAC Book that I run VMware fusion on - it lets me run Vista, Windows 7 and Linux all in VMs on the MAC

The VMs are essentially large files - setup the VM the way you want then snapshot it or save it - set aside a copy of that big VM file and then when you screw up the VM just delete it and get a copy of the saved version

[PUMP]

Upon investigation I found that out of my three home computers (1-desk top Compaq, 1 laptop Dell and 1 laptop Acer) only the Acer laptop with Vista OS is virtualization compatible. So I will wait until the other two need to be replaced before proceeding with virtual machine approach. Thanks for the info though.

[kirkmears]

while vmware is the industry standard, you can also use microsofts version (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=28C97D22-6EB8-4A09-A7F7-F6C7A1F000B5&displaylang=en), which is free...its worth noting that people at microsoft use vmware during their presentations which is almost as funny as a mac book running w7 :icon_lol:jk-. used both and i only use vmware at home due to its performance, just make sure you have plenty of RAM to reap its benefits.

Doug, have you used direct access to physical disk with vista/w7 as the host?

[Silver_2000]

while vmware is the industry standard, you can also use microsofts version (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=28C97D22-6EB8-4A09-A7F7-F6C7A1F000B5&displaylang=en), which is free...its worth noting that people at microsoft use vmware during their presentations which is almost as funny as a mac book running w7 :icon_lol:jk-. used both and i only use vmware at home due to its performance, just make sure you have plenty of RAM to reap its benefits.

Doug, have you used direct access to physical disk with vista/w7 as the host?
Havent done much with Vista or Win 7 yet

Bob

Im not sure what yuou checked for Virtualization capable - but you may be getting terms mixed up. I know that some newer chips have features that HELP the use of VMs but I doubt it would prevent you from running on older hardware

[Sandman]

Havent done much with Vista or Win 7 yet

Bob

Im not sure what yuou checked for Virtualization capable - but you may be getting terms mixed up. I know that some newer chips have features that HELP the use of VMs but I doubt it would prevent you from running on older hardware

Right. The Pentium D I'm running does not support virtualization directly. But I still run VMWare. It's not quite as snappy as I would like it to be, but it does run.