Free Registry Cleaning Programs

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Free Registry Cleaning Programs

One of the most overlooked and forgotten about parts of system maintenance is of course cleaning your registry out! Even F1 forgot about it and when I was writing this article I reminded him :) Today I'm going to put a little spotlight on what is viewed by many to be the best registry cleaning applications out there. The biggest requirement is for course that a fully working version is FREE! I believe each and every one of these programs are at least worth downloading. I'll go a bit more in depth on them sometime. Today's purposes are just a quick peak at them.

What will we be looking at today?

RegScrubXP 3.25
RegCleaner
EasyCleaner
Microsoft RegClean
WT RegCleanerXP
TweakNow RegCleaner

Every time you run an application it opens up various registry keys. If your registry is alot bigger than it needs to be you can run into quite a few slowdowns. Everything from application load times to bootup times can be affected by this. If you've installed or uninstalled quite a few applications recently or since the last time you cleaned your registry then you'd better go through this article and get your registry cleaned up!

Before doing anything else make a backup of your registry! These programs potentially can prevent some applications from working properly. Do this at your own risk. They worked properly for ME, but your mileage may vary greatly.

| IANAG Reg Backup/Restore Tool |

Microsoft's Entry

I suggest you run the one from Microsoft first since that is the fastest easiest way to remove a ton of entries. Just like Spyware cleaning you can't ever be satisfied with just a single program! Make sure you use at least 2 or 3 of the programs listed above.

782Kb download

RegCleaner

It has a ton of other tools built in that we don't really care about today. This is a perfect example of why you need to do multiple registry cleaners. Seconds after running the MS tool I get a fairly long list of additional items to remove!

I might take a closer look into this application in the future, but for those of you that wanted to know what this application looks like here ya go.

This application did NOT play nicely with RegScrubXP. It deleted settings that were needed to run the other registry editor! Keep an eye on this one if you use multiple Registry cleaners.

Just a 541Kb download.

Easy Cleaner

Easy Cleaner is probably the most polished LOOKING application we have here. It uses an XP style theme that so many people feel so comfortable with.

This program packs in a lot of other features that I'm not interested in looking at today.

This is the largest program I'm looking at today. It ways in far above the rest at 3.4Mb

RegScrubXP

From the screenshot you can see what all it scans for. This is one of my least favorites that I'm taking a look at today, but it's a very small download (579Kb) and best of all it's free. It's an extremely simple layout and it only does exactly what we want it to do for the purposes of this article.

WT Registry Cleaner

This one is a very good looking application that also only does what we're wanting it to do today. That's a good thing because it makes this a great looking extremely simple application for what we're doing today.

885Kb download

Tweaknow RegCleaner

Even though you have to have the pay version of this program to take out application related registry items this program still handles the rest of the stuff well enough that it's worth using the free version.

723Kb

The End

That's a quick overview of the best of what's freely available to us all, so make sure that you start using at least one of them!

I really didn't find anything that truly stood out from the pack, so basically take a good look at the screenshots and do a little bit of testing yourself and you should be able to find something that feels good for you.