As you may not know, Scotty, we did endorse RegistryBooster here, until it was abruptly discontinued. I will be contacting a much more well known affiliate partner this morning that has provided a free and safe registry cleaner nearly everyone has used. Registry cleaners helped finance this site for years and keep it operating. It also put a meal on the table for me, and allowed me to provide some perks for our volunteers and members very rarely. I am therefore biased on the subject, or should be. But truly, I would only, as a consultant, recommend CCleaner to clients. Paid ones are fine, yes, but CCleaner is now financed by a networked version that runs over Active Directory. People are also willing to buy support for the program, and it looks like it helped Piriform build an office here in New York City. If the program was so bad, the entire world would not be using it.
As a tech, I knew a man who cleaned the registry himself - and performed the exact same actions on the file system as CCleaner. It was an utter embarrassment and ridiculousness watching this person do this for 20 minutes, walk away, and expect that anyone would be satisfied. Sadly, the client was ignorant of the activity taking place. I think registry cleaners get a bad deal because they are easy for developers to write - and sadly, once written, they often go to the dogs. Some proprietary code is floating around that companies are likely buying up or acquiring to do reg. cleaning apps for software companies.
But as always, backup, backup, backup. Try to avoid bundled applications that promise to do everything. If you get a registry cleaner, get a highly rated one like CCleaner or Eusing. If you want a program that preserves disk space, go with Raxco PerfectDisk: it is a family owned company. Diskeeper, in my view, continues to monetize on their success of selling defrag over to Microsoft for NT, but PerfectDisk has real innovation. I've never seen a computer really run any better with Diskeeper installed. Go and look at the quality anti-virus solutions and don't rely on bundled apps - again - like Norton Uninstall, to get rid of apps. Look at what pro's still rely on from time to time. Of course, I'm talking about Revo Uninstaller. Because we need to keep the site afloat, this year we decided to change our approach and affiliate ourselves with good companies with software that many of us use ourselves. I won't personally endorse any Uniblue product at this rate, or registry cleaners I haven't tested.
I've been using CCleaner, on occasion, for years, without difficulty. I have used it on XP systems that went unpatched since release time, on P4's with 128MB of RAM. That is when you see what a registry cleaner can do, when it is cleaning up 10,000 invalid entries off an IDE hard drive. There are good registry cleaners. Ironically, those against registry cleaners don't realize that Microsoft released one themselves, but abruptly discontinued it, back in 1999. The problem is registry cleaners, written poorly, under-developed, and marketed as scareware. They have color-coded threat levels and barometers like your computer is a time bomb about to explode. Those are the ones to avoid, and the type of software I do not want this website associated with.