Stefan Mileschin

Registry Cleaners Demystified

Registry cleaners aren’t a magic button you can click to speed up your PC, as scammy PC-cleaning software developers would like you to believe.

The Windows registry is a huge database of settings — both for Windows itself and for programs you install. For example, if you install a program, there’s a good chance that program would save its settings to the registry. Windows would also save pointers to that program. For example, if the program were registered as the default program for a certain file type, Windows would save a registry entry so it can remember that’s the default program.

If you uninstalled the program, there’s a good chance it would leave all its registry entries behind. They’d stay in your registry until you reinstalled Windows, refreshed your PC, “cleaned” them with a registry cleaner, or deleted them manually.

All a registry cleaner does is scan your registry for entries that appear outdated and remove them. Registry cleaner companies want you to believe that this would result in big performance improvements so you’ll buy their software.

http://www.howtogeek.com/171633/why-...r-fix-crashes/