Do Registry Cleaners Work? A Skeptics Look at the Top Registry Repair Programs
It’s my nature to be skeptical. I’m not a big believer in quick fixes, and avoid hype and fads like the plague. For this reason when websites starting hyping all the benefits of registry cleaners I couldn’t believe they were capable of improving computer performance.
Most websites I found while researching these programs only hyped them up. None presented any of the cons to these computer programs or what they were actually capable of doing to improve PC performance. If I wanted to learn about how these programs could improve performance I was going to have to test it myself. That is exactly what I did I created a comparison of Registry Repair software on my own test computer to decide if these programs really worked. My results? Well they were actually surprising.
The Scan Speed Meant Nothing
I timed all of the registry cleaners I tested to see how long they took to do a complete scan. Times for the full scan were all between one and ten minutes long. I did notice that a second scan with the same program was faster then the first, I can only presume they cached some of the data they found on the first scan.
The performance of a program and speed of a scan were unrelated. In conclusion I decided that the speed the scan completed was in no way relevant to the performance of the software.
Number of Errors found Didn’t Equal Repairs Done
This really surprised me. The number of errors found during the full scan of my computer wasn’t the same number of repairs, or better stated changes made to my registry. The top performing program made about 60% of the changes found in the full scan. I can only assume that registry cleaners find as many errors as possible so it looks like your computer really needs a cleaning.
Performance Came from Add-on Features
This was the test that really started to make me more of a believer in registry repair software. At this point I had found tiny improvements in performance after repairing all errors found in a complete scan. When I began to run the startup optimizers, junk file cleaners and other system utilities that were built into many of the registry cleaners I tested I began to see some good results.
My boot time of Windows was reduced, as well as the startup time for many of my programs. I measured the performance improvement by timing the start up with a computer start up timer so everything was equal.
In the End
While my test PC wasn’t that infected with junk files and registry errors I was able to squeeze out some performance. How ever it wasn’t really from the registry repair portion of each program. The improvement came from running the additional programs that came with the software.
From my testing you can improve the performance of your computer using a registry cleaner. How ever ensure the one you buy has a guarantee, not everyone gets the same results so it’s a good idea to be able to get a refund if you’re not happy.
