GameBanshee Forums

I recently downloaded the [url="http://www.tweaknow.com/"]Tweak Now[/url] Registry Cleaner. It 'appears' very user friendly, and even has colour coding alerting people when items are not safe to delete...

I ran it, and the programme found 49 items that were deemed safe for deletion...

The thing is... I tend to be *very* cautious about messing around with my registry, and I'm not sure whether I should proceed...

I'm looking to tweak my machine as much as feasible, but I'd rather not do anything I might regret.

Advice? Suggestions?

Well, its safe to delete if they are listed as safe for deletion. No problems will arise if you do so. I remember having a similar registry cleaner on my computer and I've deleted countless unused files in the registry with that program and still no problem for my computer here.

I use it too and AFAIK it only points out items that are indeed safe to delete (like deleted files). If you want to be really safe with your Registry you can use ERUNT to make daily backups. It comes with NTREGOPT, which optimizes the Registry (a bit like defragging the disk). I use both.

Honestly, I'd just leave the registry alone. It has thousands of entries which means that you'll experience absolutely no improvement in performace by deleting 49 of them, and you're running the risk of messing up your computer (or at least creating a big headache for yourself) by running registry cleaners. Windows does a pretty good job at maintaining the registry; why would you trust third party software to do a better job at cleaning it up than the people who created it?

I'm absolutely convinced that every single registry-cleaner is snake-oil and increases in performance are nothing more than a placebo. The same goes for pretty much any software that promises it'll magically make your computer faster (RAM cleaners, I'm looking at you). Fourty nine lines of text, which is what you're planning on deleting, can't take more than 5kB of memory. That's ~0.5% of one megabyte. Create a text file and copy/paste until you have 50 or so lines and then see how big it gets. The time you'll spend "tweaking" will be orders of magnitude more than any time you'll save due to a performance boost, if there is one at all, which I personally doubt.

Unless you're running Gentoo Linux and you plan on tweaking the kernel source code (which is also a massive waste of time, but can at least offer a real boost in speed, even if marginal), I'd stay away from "tweaking" altogether - it's next to impossible to make your computer faster through software.