guess ill do it manually in regedit. was being lazy and wanted to see if a program could do it for me lol
I use teh mighty Crap Cleaner! Mostly just to one-click empty the recycle bin, temp files, browser cookies/history/cache, application settings, prefetch files etc. It also has a reg cleaner, and ability to remove programs from the add/remove list if they're problematic, and a good startup tweaker rather than using msconfig. It's one of the first little apps I install nowadays. http://www.ccleaner.com
Registry cleaners aren't always the best thing to use. Sure, you might have installs that go wrong or problems, but the more your registry gets full, bloated and winds up having troubles, the closer you should be to formatting. Even if you make a backup of your registry before encountering any problems, it's an important part of Windows OS and once it gets fucked, you're headed in the wrong direction. Just keep your computer clean and try to avoid having to worry about Registry cleaners.
IT IS IMPOSSIBLE FOR AN AUTOMATIC REGISTRY CLEANER TO WORK RIGHT. It requires that the programmers who wrote the software have a perfect understanding of how every application on your computer works, which is obviously impossible. Short of an automatic cleaner, you can use Norton WinDoctor to scan for possible errors and then fix them yourself -- this approach has the benefit of not having to wade through endless subfolders in REGEDIT, but it will still screw up your computer sure as I'm alive if you let it automatically fix problems. That said, I'm fond of a little program I discovered called NTREGOPT (do a google search) that rebuilds your Registry from the ground up to optimize the the internal structure of the registry file. (For a visual aid, think of a tree with some long branches and some short ones, then prune the long branches and attach the pruned bits to the short branches, so all the branches are the same length when you're done.)
Really now? I love how you say wrong and provide not a single word to back-up your statement. And they say '06's were bad.
Read my explanation and try to come up with a meaningful counterargument. Then, when you can't, feel free to GTFO.
I'm assuming that you know the hierarchal structure of the registry. That means you can't just reattach shit anywhere. From what you describe, its at best a registry defragger...
I know that it's presented as a hierarchy in REGEDIT, but considering it's a database hive that needs to be quickly searchable, it's most likely stored as a sorted binary tree. Binary trees get lopsided when they get old, unless they have built-in optimization routines, and as evidenced by the improvements I see when I run NTREGOPT, the Registry does not have those routines. NTREGOPT actually specifically states that it does not physically defrag the Registry file.
God I hate having to explain myself when I don't think I need to! I love the classy attacks because I'm 07 too CCleaner as an example does quite a few things automatically to clean your registry: - Missing shared DLLs - Unused File Extensions - ActiveX and Class Issues - several others This works perfectly and I've never had an issue from this - yet you state this is "impossible". Hence my curt one-worded response. Though, I'm not sure what some people's expectations are of registry cleaning. There, I'm sure my reasoned response changed your mind and I'm not wasting my time at all.
actually crap cleaner does a pretty good job. once in a while i use a combination of oleview and regedit to remove and or edit by hand.
Bitch bitch bitch. Why should I think your opinion has any merit if you can't explain it? To be fair, though, you did explain it eventually. You're right that misdirected DLL references are easy enough to fix, though it's a more sound approach to copy those DLLs into the "system32" folder than to change the references, because the built-in reference to "system32" in the "PATH" variable will cause all well-written programs to automatically look for DLLs there without having to be told to. Pretty much all other Registry "errors" that the various cleaners I've tried can detect usually turn out to be either bytecode that makes no sense to any program except the one that created the entry, or filenames with command-line flags integrated into them; one "error" in particular that I see all the time when I run a Registry cleaner is a reference to an icon embedded in some library file or another, usually referred to with a ",1" immediately after the library's filename. Invariably when I check I find out that the icon or subroutine or whatever does exist and I can only assume the Registry cleaner tripped over the command-line flag thinking that it was part of the filename itself. Fixing these sorts of errors almost always causes problems that may or may not be immediately apparent. Unused file extensions comprise such a small portion of even the worst-kept computer's Registry, though, that they're not even worth paying attention to.
Sorry for being rude, but the reason I didn't think I had to explain is that earlier in the thread I'd already quoted CCleaner as a working reg cleaner already. Makes me all pissy.