Hi, I am a new member so hello to all fellow forum members.
I have just had to buy a new PC as my old one was very unstable and eventually gave up on me. I think some of this was self inflicted after using various optimizing and registry cleaning utilities so I will be doing my best to ensure this does not happen again .
I have had CCleaner on my previous PC and its also on my new one too as I know this to be a very good program. I dont think I have seen or heard a bad word about it.
Although I have the program on my PC, i have only ever used the default cleaning and wondered whether all cleaning catagories should be checked including advanced cleaning ?
Have any other users experienced subsequent problems after cleaning up the Registry ?
Any responses and recommendations would be gratefully appreciated.
Also all the stuff listed under Advanced can be left alone until you familiarize yourself with what they'll do. I'd highly recommend reading the CCleaner documentation at: http://docs.piriform.com/
A welcome from me too Andy, and if after reading the documentation linked to by Andavari, and the advice in Nergals signature, you're still unsure about anything, please post back and ask.
We'd much prefer to see "what does this do" instead of "how do I fix this".
I personally have stopped using any registry cleaners, including CCleaner's, years ago
I have never seen any noticeable improvement after cleaning the registry, and on the other hand never seen any performance decrease by not cleaning the registry.
I have experimented with registry cleaners many years ago, and I have noticed that the registry will actually shrink a few KB if you compress it after the cleaning run. But what do a few KB mean when we now have memory in the size of gigabytes, and disk capacities in the size of terabytes?
My personal advice: let Windows handle its registry, and you use the computer doing something productive.
It's more commonly known as a "Registry Defrag", with tools like these. I personally use and have never had a problem with Free Registry Defrag. However there are some registry defrag programs that have been reported to corrupt the registry so making a System Restore Point is wise, even much wiser to make an ERUNT backup since it allows you to restore the registry outside of Windows.