Abyssal Registry Cleaner for Windows

Abyssal Registry Cleaner is a freeware registry cleaner that offers several advantages, chief among them safety and simplicity. Like other registry cleaners, it scans your system's Windows registry for broken, invalid, and corrupt entries and deletes all or some of them, as you choose. And, like other free registry cleaners we've tried, it tends to emphasize speed and safety over deep cleaning. It automatically backs up your registry before it deletes any files, making it possible to restore the previous version if you need to.

Abyssal Registry Cleaner's user interface resembles many similar tools, with large, colorful icons on the left side of a compact window; simple is better, we think, and Abyssal leaves little out, though we didn't find a Help file, and the program's Web site offered little in the way of documentation. Not that this tool is difficult to use in any way! But freeware of this sort that emphasizes ease of use and safe scanning has special appeal for beginners, and some basic documentation would help. Nevertheless, we clicked the big Scan button and then started a scan. The scan is quick but not instantaneous by any means, and it turned up a variety of potential junk entries, displaying them with check boxes in a list view as well as broken down by various categories. We could either check those we wanted to clean, or click Select all. When we'd made our choices, we clicked Fix selected. A pop-up notified us that the program was creating an automatic backup of our registry settings, and it even gave the backup file's full directory path. But we could also roll back changes by clicking Restore in Abyssal's menu. The only other button opens the Settings, which include language options and ignored strings.

We ran Abyssal Registry Cleaner several times subsequently after our initial scan and cleaning, yet Abyssal proclaimed our registry healthy, finding no further invalid entries. This safe, simple cleaner doesn't bundle a lot of extras, and it doesn't need them. Used regularly, it can keep your Windows system running smoothly.