Can you defrag your registry?
Auslogics, publisher of the popular Auslogics Disk Defrag, also makes another defragger: Registry Defrag. Does it actually work? Is it all smoke and mirrors, or does using this free program result in faster clock times?
The empirical, Friday afternoon answer is: it's hard to tell. If that sounds familiar to those of you who've used other registry cleaners and their siblings, it should. It's hard to gauge if these programs are effective because once you're done using it, you'd need more than a mere store-bought machine with store-loaded programs to judge CPU speed by.
It's much harder to gauge the effectiveness of registry cleaners than disk fixers.
Regardless of its effectiveness, the Auslogics Registry Defrag looks and functions much like the Auslogics Disk Defrag. When you run it, it tells you that it will perform a registry analysis, after which you will be able to review its registry report, and once that's done with you can run the registry optimization, requiring a reboot to defrag and compact the registry.
It's a fairly serious program, and once you begin the analysis it won't let you move the mouse outside the program window. It also "strongly recommends" that users close all other programs while it runs, although this is a standard warning for registry cleaning apps.
Empirically, Disk Defrag seems to have an effect on performance.
After having run the program on my main work machine, a Windows XP box that sees an average of four to six programs installed and then uninstalled per day, not to mention having an average of two dozen Firefox tabs open, a registry sweeper should make the computer run faster. Even though I run disk defraggers a couple of times a week and keep a vigilant watch on resources, I expected an empirical yet noticeable change in CPU speed.
That never materialized. Resource-intensive programs like Internet browsers and e-mail clients may be piggish, but they're necessary. They didn't load any faster or slower than normal after running the reg defrag. It may be that I'll only notice after a few days or so, but until a registry defragger or cleaner can demonstrate benchmarkable improvements to a computer, they'll be little more than 21st century snake oil.
Seth peers into the deep, dark corners of software so that you don't have to. He has yet to suffer a single nightmare about OS/2. You can follow him on Twitter. 
Those two applications keep my computer in a perfect performance condition.
I don't use them much, only when I experience that my computer is running a bit slower than usual.
These applications are a must have for every computer user.
As you install and remove programs, change settings, etc. you are creating registry entries. These bits and settings remain in your registry long after software is changed or removed.
They sit there, even if they are just empty folders. Problem is, your CPU is looking in those folders for information it needs to run every operation in the computer. 100 empty folders, 100 useless empty things to look in during every move your computer makes.
The speed you gain is not processor speed, or application speed. It is a reduction in the amount of time (in MS) that the computer takes to access the Windows Registry.
http://webmaster360.org/How-To/Win-XP-Tweaks-using-Regedit.html
But however, i have not yet found a good defragmenter since they have some sort of weird programming that you have no real control over them. e.g:you cannot manually choose where you would want the files to be on the disk's surface.
After defraging with this application, I sometimes get a slight sluggishness occur and freeze-ups have also result both upon start-up and while surfing, too. Luckily, on next startup, the problem seems to resolve itself, but you can't be sure it's always going to.
Two years or so ago, I was using another brand of registry defrag,
of which I can't recall the name. The first half dozen defraggings showed no apparent ill-effects then an unexpected slow-up occurred
which was so severe, I had to do a full recovery of the operating system. Sometime later, I used it again, being not quite sure if it really was it that caused the need for the last recovery. I soon found out it was when a second recovery was needed.
My advise: Use ANY registry defrag sparingly and with caution. An application called ERUNT, although an old piece of software, has an Optimizer included, but no defrag. I often use that with no ill-effects.
Of course, it's necessary to carefully study the names of the files and strings thrown up by the search each time, before deleting.
I offer these parameters for running fast:
1. Boot up time (no faster now than it was in the pentium I, II and III days with the released windows OS for that era. My laptop is a AMD turon 64x2 with 2 GB DDR RAM runing Vista premium...guess what I can still make a cup of coffee in the time it reboots to windows, and boot into windows (see below)
2. Boot in time, this has slowed waaaay down. Sure no your in windows but the start up is loading tons of un needed programs...most likely your antivirus is running an un-needed scan and all kinds of stupid things are launching such as windows up-date...
3. Program start up time - varies with the type of program, I would go with the time it takes to load Office pro program (word 2003/07, excel, powerpoint)
4. The benchmarking should be done with the Industry standard low, medium and high end desktop or laptop configurations offered by the big three HP, Dell, Levono (no an alienware box is not a industry standard SOHO user!!! darn geeks you serve no purpose to the general public showing off how much you can overclock).
Now lets roll that up into one metric called Fast. The fastest box i ever had was a Pentium III 333 with 128mb of ram running windows 95. Every office program just popped open in less than a second...the boot time was about 32 seconds....it was a general public box selling for about 1200 bucks at the time.
knowlageable user.
*** "install what you NEED everything else is hog feed" ***
- by martinex April 7, 2008 2:40 AM PDT
- Anyone who uses a program that changes their registry without first backing up said registry deserves whatever horrible thing happens to them.
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