Registry 101 & Why Your Registry Cleaner is Useless

10 Q&A’s about Your PC’s Registry & Registry Cleaners

Backstory

When I first came to Reimage, I had a lot to learn. I had no knowledge or experience in computer repair, being merely a content writer. My first few months working at Reimage, I had nothing but questions. One thing that completely mystified me was the topic of a computer’s registry and the role of registry cleaners in the PC repair market. I’d used them before on my own computer, in the effort to speed up PC performance and was convinced it was the be-all and end-all of home computer maintenance.

The Truth About Registry Cleaners

Part of the challenge Reimage encounters in the course of our marketing efforts is the public’s confusion on what we do. Being an innovative technology this is not surprising. However, it gets really insulting when we are compared to registry cleaners.

According to WikiPedia:

A registry cleaner is a type of software utility designed for the Microsoft Windows operating system whose purpose is to remove redundant or unwanted items from the Windows registry. However the necessity and usefulness of registry cleaners is a controversial topic, with experts not agreeing on their benefit. The problem is further clouded by the fact that malware and scareware is often being associated with utilities of this type.

New Reimage.com Technology Beats AntiViruses and More…

We had a lot of fun with this experiment. We went to all the nastiest sites and engaged in the most dubious on-line activities. A few days on, the PC ground to halt with so many nasty viruses, trojans, malware and corruption that we thought the time was right to initiate the experiment. Pitching Reimage against multiple anti viruses, registry cleaners and spyware removal programs, here are the results:

Reimage cures corrupted registry blues

Looking through the Microsoft knowledge base, I stumbled upon this neat little list of the most popular KB articles of the last three months. Through these popularity ratings, you can see the information that most people are looking for, and this can give you a vague idea of the most common problems encountered.

Number 17 on the latest chart is an article describing the manual solution for a corrupted registry.