Merlin

I have used Registry Mechanic on an old corrupt Registry after BugDoctor and RegDoctor each found about a dozen errors. Registry Mechanic took a few hours to run through the 9Mb Registry, but ended up with more than 500 errrors that could be fixed. So my verdict is that it's more thorough than many other products but very slow.

Thank you for these very comprehensive instructions. I have done some research on scanreg and have found that it has a size limit of about 8.5Mb for system.dat. Some of the tools that I have used (eg Norton WinDoctor) simply report this large size as a corrupt registry. Fortunately, I was able to fix this issue using the Win95 compaction approach, which also allowed me to run scanreg as well as other utilities afterward. It goes as follows: 1) Run a registry cleaner to remove any redundant entries. I tried several and found that Registry Mechanic found the most errors to fix. 2) Open regedit, move the cursor to the top (My Computer) and export the whole registry to compact.reg 3) Boot to DOS, cd c:\windows and run regedit /c compact.reg 4) Reboot (ctrl-alt-del) to Windows and check the file size of system.dat and other diagnostics. So with respect to CCleaner it would be useful for Win9x users to have a utility to accomplish this, since not everyone might be comfortable with using DOS or regedit.

I think this thread was about integrated security suites and not so much about individual products. As for stand-alone firewalls, SYGATE personal firewall is probably one of the best, and I have read elsewhere that the newer versions of OUTPOST are supposed to be top-notch as well (though I had problems with the first few releases).

I am using Win98 and my system.dat is at 8.9Mb ... scanreg won't work with that and the compactors mentioned above are only for Win2000 and up. I for one would appreciate a tool that can help with compacting my registry.

First of all, what do you mean with "best" - catches the most attacks, does not crash, is least drawing on resources, has the most features, is easiest to configure and use ...? I have an old 266MHz Pc on which I used McAffee for several years until it slowed the system down to the extent that it was not usable anymore. Then I switched to Panda AntiVirus which was fine, but when I upgraded to the most recent version the new engine would catch so many apps as hostile and was simply so annoying that I had to get rid of it. Now I am using PC-Cillin 2005 together with Spybot on this old machine and it seems to keep things running well. I also have a fairly new laptop with an AMD64, I use both Norton Internet Security 2005 as well as Norton SystemWorks 2005 on this machine. Setup was a bit difficult because bot apps share the same AV and I had to uninstall and reinstall a couple of times until the AV was smoothly integrated with both products. Since then it's running well and I can't complain about any intrusions or performancre problems. I'm posting in this forum because Norton already has a duplicate Cleanup and Cleansweep features, and I was wondering if there was any added benefit from using CCleaner as well.