Not sure if the hardware forum is the right place for this but its as close as i could get. Has anyone used a registry cleaner program at all? Ive installed and uninstalled many games in the last couple for years and have heard not to use such a program but as i see many of them available i have to think that someone is using them. I like to keep my PC clean and was considering such a progam.

good free one i used for years is CCleaner

I use a couple lol, for some reason they find different hings. CCleaner, Uniblue RegisteryBooster.

Do you folks know how the cleaner knows which files are no longer needed? Such as leftovers from uninstalled games.

Originally posted by grandpagamer

Do you folks know how the cleaner knows which files are no longer needed? Such as leftovers from uninstalled games.

Have you ever tried to open a desktop shortcut after removing the program it belongs to and getting "cannot find the program"?

A registry cleaner works like that. It tries to follow the path from each registry entry to it's destination ( the program ). When the path is not there, the registry entry is removed.

Thank you all for your posts. I will give the CC cleaner a go.

Registry cleaners do a good job for the most part. Sometimes they may do more than they should. Be sure to use one (and learn how to use the feature) that saves the registry entries it will remove.

The Windows Registry files are very important and their integrity does need to be respected.

I used the CC and afterwards finished up what was left of the Aion beta and played some Warhammer and noticed no problems with anything.  The computer i used it on is the one i game on and use it for little else.  It cleaned 76 mgs of files so i guess it was over due :). Thank you all again.

So I actually needed to do the same thing for a computer and I found a review where someone imaged a very well used installation of Windows then ran a bunch of different registry cleaners on the image with multiple passes, and found the best result to be from jv16 PowerTools.

So I grabbed it and tried it out and it worked a lot better than the other registry cleaners I've tried (where the same registry entries pop back up when you scan a 2nd time) so I'd definitely recommend trying it out.

Usually I just use Revo Uninstaller because when you uninstall some program it cleans up the leftover registry and files.