Registry Doctor

This program offers some helpful tools for keeping your PC's Registry spic-and-span, but its hands-off approach may not be ideal for less techinical users. Registry Doctor's main window prominently displays icons for all of its tools, which include a back-up utility, a defragmenter, and a cleaner. However, these options aren't readily apparent when you launch the application; you must first click a button in the right pane to access them. And although we appreciated the ability to resize the app to better view a list of detected junk entries, we still wish it could simply be minimzed to the system tray. In our tests, the defragmenter worked quickly and even showed us how much memory the process had freed. Scanning your PC for invalid Registry keys wasn't as quick of a process, but you can choose to include or exclude certain files types, such as fonts, shared DLLs, application paths, and ActiveX controls. Unfortunately, the program doesn't organize its scan results in a similar manner. And since it can't provide information as to whether a certain key is likely malicious or benign, we'd strongly suggest using the backup tool before removing anything. On the plus side, the app doesn't affect system performance when going about its business. More experienced folks won't mind Registry Doctor's shortcomings, but newer users can find a better solution.