Sunday, December 14, 2008

Registry and Hard Drive Cleaners, Rip Offs or Great Tools?

By Ed Lathrop

I read an article on a website recently which stated registry cleaners were of no use and people shouldn't waste their time or money on them. This author said he could not change his mind about this without seeing some convincing data.

It just so happens I know from first hand experience registry cleaners do have an important role in the upkeep of today's computers. They should be used regularly and when they are not, a computer could slow down and die altogether.

You will read no technical jargon here. This is all about my business which is keeping home computers running the way they did when they were first taken out of the box. In other words, I am a computer technician and so, I will be talking from that perspective.

Customer Satisfaction

An engineer can sit in a lab and pour over theoretical computer behavior if he or she would like. However, there is one statistic an engineer will never discover. That is the thousands, yes thousands of satisfied customers who have thanked me for either properly cleaning their computers' registries or in many cases, explaining to them the proper way to use a good commercial registry cleaner.

There is absolutely no doubt about it! Making sure your computer's registry is free of corruption is a necessary part of its general maintenance, and unless you're a certified Microsoft technician, only a registry cleaner is able to handle that function. Maybe a few years ago a computer operator could get away without scanning and repairing a registry, but not today.

The newer operating systems, namely Windows XP and Vista corrupt easily, and because these OS's are so huge, a little bit of corruption goes a long way toward deteriorating their performance. As corruption builds up in the registry the computer's speed will suffer, errors will become frequent and the blue screen of death often will occur.

No Hypotheses, But a Way of Life

My livelihood is repairing computers. I've seen computers that were running so slowly they were taking 10 minutes to load a simple Web page and these computers were spyware and virus free. The owner did nothing wrong that would cause the PC to behave this way. Still, after using a good registry cleaner the computer ran great. I can't tell you how many times I've seen this has happen!

Why there are those who have a vendetta against registry cleaners, I simply don't know. These people must have not ever used one. At least, not the ones I would use.

Finally, registry scans are free. So, if you find you don't have registry corruption, you don't have to deal with a registry cleaner. However, if you do have registry corruption and you have a computer that is not functioning well. This corruption is probably the problem! At this point you really need to get that registry cleaned. I don't care what anybody else says! - 16738

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