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Registry Defrag?


henshin

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Hi henshin, and welcome to the forum.

 

In a word, no.

 

If you must defrag the registry, then use something like Free Registry Defrag, which gives you an option to analyze it first, and therefore an indication as to whether a defrag is needed.

 

It isn't something I would recommend doing, but if you do, make sure you back up the registry first with something like ERUNT, and only give it a whirl occasionally.

 

There's also a version of ERUNT available with an easy to use GUI.

 

http://forum.piriform.com/index.php?showtopic=29821

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It isn't something I would recommend doing

 

Why not?

 

Secondly, I also use registry mechanic from pc tools which has an option to defrag the registry. The only problem is that after analyzing it, it displays it's 21% fragmentated and after continuing and rebooting and analyzing it again this time it says it's fragmentated 20%. So I figure either the software is crap or something is wrong.

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The registry is so important an area on your pc, from where all sorts of terminal problems can arise, that I don't think the probably negligible benefit gained from defragging it, is worth the risks of messing about with it.

 

I think I've defragged my registry twice in the last 4 years, and the only benefit I gained was in my head. There was absolutely no discernible difference.

 

It's entirely a personal choice thing of course.

 

But for people who want to do it, please make sure you backup first.

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It's generally not a good idea to mess around with the entirety of the system registry because it's the most important part of the Windows Operating System.

Also you'll not see any noticeable speed or performance gain by defragging the registry data a machine will only gain speed and performance from a properly defragged file system.

 

Richard S.

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After 3 days use my ERUNT registry backup has grown from 50,130,238 bytes to 50,142,526 bytes,

but the "Size on Disk" has remained at 24,108,544 bytes - go figure ! !

 

I do not know how much RAM is used when the registry hives are loaded,

It might be either of the two numbers above, or a totally different number.

 

I use NTREGOPT (companion to ERUNT) once or twice a year, and that typically removes about 3%, not worth doing every day ! !

 

I believe NTREGOPT is 100% safe.

It cannot make mistakes because it does not delete keys.

I believe most registry cleaners remove keys which they think are no longer needed,

and sometimes guess wrong but, but you are the one that suffers from their mistakes.

 

Alan

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If you want to free up memory without the risk of defragging the registry go with CleanMem.

 

-1 IMHO. Doesn't work on my system (not that I expected it to do anything)

 

Back on topic...Defragging the Registry might help you gain 0.1 second in your boot time...at best. The worst case being a bug in your registry defrag program.

Piriform French translator

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I believe most registry cleaners remove keys which they think are no longer needed

Registry defraggers do not remove anything they rebuild the registry hives from scratch by reading the registry recursively and writing to a new file.

Since this process would ignore the gaps left behind from old deleted keys the end result would be registry files smaller than their originals.

 

Richard S.

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CleanMem is off topic here but I will add:

 

During the short time I used CleanMem I would witness it drop my RAM usage every 30 mins to 21-22% from as high as 50%. Unfortunately it created a problem with Returnil so I uninstalled. If I knew how to configure it to run only manually I would reinstall, and use when not in virtual mode.

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I have a shortcut for Cleanmem ("C:\WINDOWS\system32\CleanMem.exe" right click for shortcut) in my Quicklaunch Bar for a manual launch if I feel the need.

 

I don't use Returnil all the time, but when I do I'm not aware of any conflict with Cleanmem. (Returnil 2008)

 

Not off topic really as it relates to memory saving mentioned by the OP.

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