What Is “Registry” And What Do Registry Cleaners Do?

Posted on: February 22nd, 2011

You probably heard the term “Registry” in relation to your computer. It is one of those things that got mystified and people were told that it’s a very complicated, technical thing. While a regular computer user almost never need to directly do anything with the registry, it’s however not a very complicated concept.

What is “Registry”?

Registry is a large collection of settings that control how Windows and other software looks, or acts . Let me give you some examples and you’ll understand this better:

- You change the background picture on your machine. The settings for where the picture file is located, whether it’s stretched or centered or tiled, etc are stored in the Registry for the user.

- Your home page’s address in Internet Explorer is stored in the Registry, along with all the other settings of Internet Explorer.

- The list of things that are loaded during the start-up process of the computer are also stored in the Registry (with a few exceptions).

Some settings are specific to the user (eg: the background settings), and some settings are all the same for all users (eg: what software to load to handle the video card). So the Registry has user specific (“Current User”) and system wide (“Local Machine”) portions.

The number of settings in the Registry of a machine is in the order of tens or hundreds of thousands! Some settings are obscure and hardly ever used but some are very important and might cause the computer to malfunction. The Registry is made up of several files that load in during the start-up and log-in procedure of the computer. If any of these files get corrupt because of hard drive problems or other reasons, this can cause the computer to act strange, or fail to start.

Doing a ‘System Restore’ restores the registry and many times able to correct the strange behaviors.

Registry Cleaners / Fixers

Incorrect settings in a Registry can cause malfunction. So people started coming up with ideas of automated solutions that fix problems stemming from Registry issues.

Because of the high complexity of the system of settings, most of these programs either don’t do much, or cause further problems.

Pretty much the only thing that is safe to run is a registry cleaner which only removes registry entries that are no longer used, or point to files that are no longer there. The one I can recommend is CCleaner (http://filehippo.com/download_ccleaner/) which proved to be safe.

The claims that Registry cleaners / fixers speed computers up are, in reality, false. You get very minimal, if any, improvement on speed.

Therefore, for the average computer user it’s better to leave the registry alone.

Editing The Registry

The settings in the registry are normally modified by programs using a nice user interface (eg when changing the desktop background picture). However, it is possible to edit registry settings directly but it is very much not recommended to do. The reason is that it is a complex and sensitive system and a mistake can be quite hard to correct.

Some settings can only be changed by editing the registry. But usually there’s a good reason why they are not easily changeable. And sometimes fixing some issues require editing the registry – but that’s better left to computer professionals, if it comes to that.

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