REGISTRY CLEANING

Third-party clean-up tools—such as CCleaner—include Registry cleaning tools, with the promise of streamlining and speeding up Windows. These tools scan areas of the Registry for supposedly redundant entries, offering to delete them. Hundreds or even thousands of entries get removed at a time, but even if your tool doesn’t accidentally delete an important Registry entry (and it will, sooner or later), Registry cleaning offers no benefit to performance whatsoever.

You can potentially improve performance—but not by much—by defragging the Registry files (known as “hives”) using a dedicated tool, such as Registry Defrag Free ( www. registry-clean.net/free-registry-defrag.htm). It analyzes the Registry and tells you whether significant “bloating” has taken place; if it has (over 10 percent), you can take a Restore Point, then let the program compress and defrag the files.

If you’re running Windows on an SSD, however, there’s little benefit in defragging the files. In most cases, you’ll also find that Windows has done a reasonable job of keeping the hives in good order, making the process redundant.