Why reinstall the operating system

[Anupam]

Registry cleaners might be useful software for people who are experienced with computers, and its intricacies. Such people can easily look at the registry entries, and decide if those should be removed. But, for average people, registry cleaners are dangerous tools to use. If used blindly, these can cause system crash, and may even render the system unbootable. Even if you backup the registry before performing a registry cleaning, if the system becomes unbootable, the backup is not of much use. Also, in terms of increasing performance, registry cleaners have not been proven yet. Even experts say, that registry cleaners do not increase system performance.

Therefore, although, we have a Best Free Registry Cleaner article on TSA, we do not recommend registry cleaners for average users. Average users are better off without using these software. There are some registry cleaners, which are considered quite safe, like CCleaner, and Eusing... but still, if used blindly, they may still cause damage.

[J_L]

Originally Posted by Opus

This falls more in the realm of stability than performance. When you have a registry that is 25MB, shaving one or two megs does not make much difference. But it is helpful to remove old entries from software installs and uninstalls gone wrong. It is incredible how much gets left behind when you remove some applications--both on disk and in the registry. (Winamp is one of the worst culprits I have ever seen for this.) This is because many installs are written as custom apps or with old or buggy installers that do a great job getting things in but a terrible one pulling them out again.

A few months ago, I needed to uninstall a large database management application by Quest Software. This program's install had loaded numerous individual components of various kinds, but a "full" uninstall only removed most of those components. After running the uninstall, two components that were left behind refused to uninstall. They each complained that they were essential components for the main app, and neither component's uninstall was detecting that the main app had already gone. I finally had to manually remove their files and certain registry entries and then use a registry cleaner to clean-up all of the flotsam and jetsam of the components in the registry. The beauty of the registry cleaner was that it could trace all of the little tendrils of the removed programs in the registry much more quickly and accurately than I could have manually.

Kind regards,
Opus

I see. Personally, I would use something like Revo Uninstaller.

[tushR]

Little out of topic - Sometime back i was uninstalling Alien Arena (Game), uninstallation failed (due to some reason) - Checked with registry cleaner - 14,000 orphaned entries left - all registry cleaner failed except one paid one...if that had also failed then may be I would have had to go through the reinstall route.