Personally, I avoid all of those "registry cleaning" products like the plague.
Snake oil.
If your computer is running slow and you don't want a new one, just replace your hard drive with an SSD. Also, never buy a PC with a spinning disk again!
Interesting advice. Personally, I prefer to at least see a machine before diagnosing it and prescribing fixes. You know, see how it feels, run a diagnostic or two, that sort of thing. But hey, that's just me. I'm funny that way.
As for the registry, books have been written about it. The short story is that it's a hierarchical database of settings and other information unique to the system. As with all databases, incorrect entries can cause errors and superfluous information can slow the system. In fact, shortly after introducing the registry, Microsoft developed a registry cleaner (called RegClean, appropriately enough) to help clean up these sorts of problems. That was many years ago.
A "dirty" registry will still slow down a system. The difference is that it takes a lot more errors for the slowing to become noticeable simply because modern machines are so much more powerful, making the resources needed to parse the registry relatively trivial as a percentage of the whole. There was a time when cleaning up a few dozen bad entries could make a night-and-day performance difference to a system. Nowadays, not so much.
Because of this, the registry seldom needs cleaning nowadays. Yes, there will almost certainly be errors on any system's registry, but they don't cause a noticeable performance loss until you have hundreds or thousands of them. So most of the time, running automated cleaners is an unnecessary risk.
If you do have so many obsolete entries that it's affecting the system, probably the safest registry cleaner I know of is the one built into CCleaner. It's not especially aggressive, but I don't think I ever saw it damage a system in all the years I used it. It also offers the opportunity to make a backup file before it does any cleaning.
As for RegCure Pro, I never heard of it before tonight. It looks like a pretty run-of-the-mill system cleaner to me. I personally wouldn't bother with it.
Rich
