Why Registry Cleaners Do Only 1/3 of the Job

Registry cleaners are hot these days. On web sites across the internet, flashy ads offer free registry scans, promising to fix whatever ails your PC.

Results of these scans can be wildly inflated. Some cleaners may list hundreds of "registry errors," making it seem like a minor miracle that your PC continues to function at all. Are all these reported problems real, or is this a ploy to alarm you into a buying decision?

The Windows Registry Is Your PC's Nerve Center

This much is true: the registry is critical to the health of your PC. It holds key information about every program on your system, every file you've opened, and every camera or USB device you've ever plugged in.

As you install and uninstall software, add new printers and hardware, and perform other normal activities on your PC, the registry keeps records of all these events -- records that may become corrupt or inaccurate over time. PC performance suffers because every time you start your computer or launch a program, Windows has to load, process, and respond to each bad registry entry. Compounding the problem, the registry expands as it accepts new data. The more bloated and fragmented it gets, the more the registry eats up memory, creating a downward spiral of performance slowdowns.

Writing for PC Magazine, long-time technology columnist John Dvorak describes the steady decline in the registry this way: "The registry, for example, never stops growing...You install a program and it creates an entry. You uninstall the program and the entry is still there, a stub that's zeroed out but taking up space. Often elements, even after uninstalled, remain there to be loaded into the system on each boot-up. There they sit, doing absolutely nothing except make the system check in on them every so often to see if they are dead or alive."

Cleaning Is Just a Start

Cleaning and fixing the registry does give an immediate boost to your PC's speed and reliability. But the trouble is that with some registry cleaners, cleaning is all you get. No bloat removal, no defragmentation, and your registry's performance problems are not completely resolved.

So how can you optimize your registry for best performance?

Look for a comprehensive registry utility with a solid track record and a good reputation in the industry. Check computer publications for reviews and trusted web sites for analysis and comments. Make sure the software not only cleans and repairs your registry, but also performs the final two steps of registry optimization: bloat removal (compacting) and registry defragmentation.

System Mechanic has been safely cleaning and repairing Windows registries since 1998. We know which parts of the registry are safe to clean and know how to produce accurate — unexaggerated — problem lists. And with version 8's registry optimization toolset, System Mechanic also detects and removes RAM-eating bloat and defragments your registry (at next system startup — the only safe approach) for a level of performance far beyond that of ordinary registry cleaners.

System Mechanic 8 offers complete registry care, and it comes with over 40 other tune-up tools (70 in the "Pro" version) that do everything from tweaking settings for faster downloads to patching security holes.

Now only $34.97 in this newsletter, System Mechanic's complete PC tune-up is available for less than many simple registry cleaners cost all by themselves.