What is the BEST Registry Cleaner for Win 7 Ultimate or Pro 64 Bit version OS ?

I concur windows 7 iss a pretty tough OS.utilities in the wrong hands is asking for a week of migranes and will make your friends your enemies quick ..beware

I never   had any  affections for any kind of registry cleaning products,they all seemed to have the same never ending story,within 3 months I wiped my harddrive reinstalled new windows..my advice..don't spend money on those fascinating one fix all products..use your money and buy yourself a OS from Microsoft. and backup your files once in a while..too.  if you get a bug in your registry.its probably a spyware,adware or maleware. don't believe everything you read on the screen.trust me I have several years of dealing with the kinda issues,if you cant get a bug out by deleting it,open it up with wordproccessor and change the file extensions from exe too qqq

or just delete the 1st 5 lines.exit and no more bug

f-12 works wonders too iff you know a little about scripting

good luck.i would like to hear from others on this issue.

           

If all regestry cleaners are so bad, why do reputable company's rewiew & recommend them?

Because of MONEY possibly?

Nothing "stone age" about not using third-party utilities that are totally UNNECCESARY and in the wrong hands positively dangerous.

I use a number of third-party programs - just not anything that I don't need.

I agree with this, as in the end it always is about money.....isn't?

Secondly, everybody knows that tools in the wrong hands are dangerous and desastrous as well.

Third, I used a regcleaner and ever since the problem a had didn't reoccur again.

This is what I did:

After the second bsod with a memory dump I used a debugger to find the cause for bsod.

Turned out that a driver for Sweex webcam was the problem, it seem to be the driver for both Vista and Window 7 X64, so they sayed.

Driver was not officially supported by Sweex, though.

Lucky me, I performed a registry backup previous to the cleaner usage.

Instead of removing the driver, I once used a registry cleaner that repaires registry problems.

And ever since no more bsod due to the sweex webcam driver.

Overall, my experience is that with Windows 7 there's no need for registry cleaning due to the fact that such programs do frequently more harm then good.

Conclusion here is that one has to know what he's/she's doing.

Assumption is the mother of all misery.

And what does all of this proof? That Microsoft puts so much intelligence in its operating system that its is impossible to comprehend for normal persons? Or that they want an absolutely closed shop, so no one can build third party utilities for these matters? Or that they are incapable of properly documenting these things? 

The fact that with Microsoft tools you can not even copy a system disk to a new bootable system disk of the same or larger or smaller capacity is downright laughable. Third party utilities can do that, and now you write that you never know if the result is actually a good one. Well, shame on Microsoft that third parties have to write such utilities.

Windows-NT and its successors is partly based on plain theft. Microsoft stole the memory management from VMS (OpenVMS today), that is well documented. Perhaps they could have stolen the backup utility of VMS as well, that might have learned them how to copy and at the same time defragment a system disk.

I happen to agree.  I tested the company's out one day by doing a fresh install of the windows XP Pro and windows 7 64bit.  After doing all updates and having no personal information in the system I called several. Registry fixer, Registry Pro. and even used Norton, and others.  They all swore by their product and said that the system needed cleaning.  However, what was it cleaning then if there was only the OS that was there???  Some claimed that I even had virus and malware on the system.  YET, none could explain why this would have happened to an OS that was just installed.  Even took them to the date; cause you can show them when the OS was installed.  That is when I just stopped using them all together. I believe that all the Security systems out there should also remove them from the software as well.  It is unnecessary, a waist of money, and can do more harm than good.

Thank you for the P2P. and keep teaching and educating one another.

Registry cleaners aren't the only snake oil out there.

Partition managers seem to attempt to be honest, but like VitoLombard , I did some testing.

Format a new volume on any un-allocated space on a HDD Using Windows Disk Management.

There are 10 hidden files on the volume you just created. You can't see them using explorer or any program that uses the windows API. You need a program that can access the hardware directly.

Some of these are:

$Secure:$SDH

$Secure:$SHS

$TOPS:$T

../$Extend/$RMMetaDadata$Txflog\

$Bitmap

$MFT

The "$" indicates a system file. And, **NO!**Settings in explorer for showing hidden or system file will not make them visible.

The ":$XXX is not an extension, it is a stream name. Files can have more than one stream.

Format the same drive again using your favorite partition manager. You will have to find the right tools to examine the files and compare them. It is time consuming and only a few people ever need to do it, but, if you did, you would be shocked at what you find.

If you want, you can look up those file names on Google. What you find will scare you to death.

I'll save you some time and just point out a couple things those files do.

One of them records disk drive characteristics, the capabilities of the drive hardware, That includes what the drive can do on the disk controller on your motherboard at the time it was formatted. Copy that (volume/partition) information using some fancy partition manager and, you better pray the third party software knows how to rebuild the file for the drive, motherboard and drivers you are using.

There is a bitmap that shows the available unused sectors, And a bad-sector bitmap, they are stored in different formats because the bad sectors and available space are measured differently. The windows format translates the bad sector data and marks the corresponding sectors in the $Bitmap as unavailable. If your third party program copies a partition to another physical drive, or even another spot on the same drive. it will have to remap the bad sectors into the $Bitmap. If it doesn't do it correctly, (of just doesn't bother to do it at all) , you will get errors writing to bad sectors that are marked good, and waste good sectors that are marked as bad. Worse, all the raid in the world will be fubar.

The Metadata for your files are stored here. If they, or their indexes are just copied to a new larger drive  by your partition manager, or are simply left out, then all those pictures that you tagged with the date taken, camera model, added comments, edited,  or tagged people in, could get lost or SCRAMBLED.

The fact is, most of those hidden files need to be built on the system you have the drive installed in using the OS you intend to use. Some of those partition managers I checked, simply filled the drive with some of those hidden files that were copies of the files from some other COMPLETELY DIFFERENT drive. Sometimes  they  just set up the basic partition info for a UNIX, Linux or the XP operating system. I've even found brand new OEM and retail boxed drives come from the factory with incorrect partition info. Worse yet, I have found brand new pre-built  systems, formatted  with the files from a earlier model of the PC that had a different brand, size and characteristics of the drive. Having the wrong format usually means the system SEEMS to work just fine, until the drive gets full, or you try to upgrade an OS, or you try to recover a backup, or you launch some new program that is cataloging your precious photos and all those old home movies, or you get a update and  after it reboots you get a blue screen of death.

I've found I can build systems that run 5, 10 and even 20 years without ever having a problem. The starting point for building a reliable computer, or even preparing a new pre-built PC is to format all the drives using the OS. From there on, I avoid all third party programs that modify the OS or the drive format. That includes registry checkers, disk cleaners, partition managers and God Forbid, those programs that claim to have a magic button that will make your computer run faster, remove all viruses and dispense solid gold coins out of the DVD player slot. 

I keep telling Jack there are no magic beans, no pot of gold at the top of the beanstalk or magic fix all button, but he sees those ads on TV and keeps bricking his moms computer.

BTW -  If you just want to just SEE those files, format a partition, run CCleaner, analyse the new partition, click on one of the purple squares in the fragment map and then click the "Files" tab. This is not an endorsement of CCcleaner or any other third party utility for the purposes of repairing a system, but it will let you check to see if those "dollar sign" files are all there.