Are registery cleaners necessary?

[Dswissmiss]

Quick question:
Are reg cleaners really necessary to keep your Pc healthy? If so, which cleaners do you recommend? Or can this be done manually through regedit?

thanx
Dswissmiss


EDIT: oops, just realized there was another thread on this under the XP forum....sorry.

[Panama Red]

You're right, recommeded registry tools was just discussed but to answer your question of "necessary", here's some thoughts. I use Registry Healer (although RegClean is free). From what I've read, every time you install or uninstall a program, update at Microsoft, add or remove an icon, open and close programs, untick programs from the start up tab in Msconfig or even just operate a program normally, two things happen. Your hard drive moves data to and from memory and virtual memory which causes fragmentation, and second your registry and valid paths are changing. You'll notice a fragmented hard drive over time as the system begins to slow down. Same with a registry that isn't cleaned. For example, I just "tuned up" a machine the other night that hadn't had routine maintenance done since it was new in 2000. When I ran a Registry Cleaning operation, 1134 registry changes were made!! That's the most I've ever seen. If you'd like to read more, here's a link:

http://www.fixregistry.com/regheal/index.htm