Registry Utilities – CCleaner and RegCompact.NET
Posted on July 11, 2005, under Web Dev/Tech.
I went hunting for some free, useful, ‘safe’ registry tools today. I used to have a couple on-hand, but they either moved to pay-for versions (which isn’t bad, I just didn’t want to pay more than $15 or so) or just plain disappeared off of the internet. Today I came across two great, free utilities.
The first is called CCleaner, which is short for Crap Cleaner, and clean it does. It has functionality to delete all kinds of temp files lying around your computer, which is great, and works well. However the registry cleanup, which I was more interested in, did a super job. I did a scan for registry issues, and it found old keys that other scanners hadn’t found in the past. Keys of apps I’d deleted over a year ago. I was able to clean up a whole bunch of obsolete stuff in my registry. I highly recommend this utility to do some registry ‘healing’, it does a great job. [Tip] As with all registry cleaners, don’t just click ‘Delete All’. Make sure you know what you are removing from the registry.
The second utility is a new version of a shareware utility that disappeared in the past, but has now resurfaced as a .NET application. RegCompact.NET will take all the wasted space in your registry in installing/uninstalling apps and using tools like CCleaner, space left over from deleted registry keys, and compact your registry to bring the size down. The new version seems to work well, however it does require you have .NET installed on your machine.
Overall I’m pretty happy with the combination of these two registry tools.
