[X2Go-User] [OT] Registry Cleaners (was: where are settings stored on Windows)

[Stefan Baur]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256

Am 20.07.2015 um 14:31 schrieb James M. Pulver:

> I'm not anyone with special insight, nor have I done a study, but
> in my personal experience, Registry cleaners like CCleaner have
> never hurt a Windows computer in any noticeable way. That said, I
> haven't seen them help noticeably either. To me, the concept is
> plausible, like defragmenting your disk - but on modern equipment,
> it rarely makes much difference in the vast majority of cases. And
> the only possible improvement might be a slight performance
> improvement - what Registry cleaners do doesn't fix specific issues
> as far as I can tell. For an almost obligatory automobile analogy,
> changing your transmission fluid(registry cleaner) is a different
> sort of thing than rebuilding your transmission(professional
> registry alterations to address very specific issues).

Well, sorry, your personal experience is just anecdotal experience and
not considered a reliable source by Wikipedia standards, either. ;-)
So here's a [citation needed] for you, too. ;-)

I can say I've seen more than just one machine that some clueless user
had issues with, tried to fix them by applying some more or less shady
registry cleaner, and botching the machine even further, to the point
that it wouldn't even boot into Windows anymore, BSOD'ing or getting
stuck in the "Loading Windows" screen.

That's because even the most well-meaning registry cleaners try to
apply certain, well, let's call them "standard procedures".  They will
work, or at least cause no further harm, on a standard machine - but
if the user (or even some driver installation, say, for a FakeRAID
controller or some special Intel chipset rather than the standard
SATA/PATA driver) previously tweaked the registry in a way the tool
doesn't expect, things are going south.

And yes, I've seen that happen.  More than once.  Usually with people
of the "clueless tinkerer" kind, that installed every
performance-tuning tool and registry patch they could find in the
computer magazine of their choice.

Which may explain why you didn't encounter it - in your environment,
machines are probably centrally managed and most users don't have the
rights to mess with the registry or to install "performance tuning"
tools, so if anybody ever uses a registry cleaner, it's someone from
your IT staff with at least a little bit of a clue of what they're
doing, and they're operating on a standardized Windows installation,
not one that has been messed with over and over before.

Kind Regards,
Stefan
- -- 
BAUR-ITCS UG (haftungsbeschränkt)
Geschäftsführer: Stefan Baur
Eichenäckerweg 10, 89081 Ulm | Registergericht Ulm, HRB 724364
Fon/Fax 0731 40 34 66-36/-35 | USt-IdNr.: DE268653243
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v2

iQEcBAEBCAAGBQJVrWMmAAoJEG7d9BjNvlEZfscIALGtTesaGIXilhK41v993n/9
Z7XUa5986XJS1EprHq5exQ5+xdaC5UePXvaDZKPky4oinupLvg8ErG+l0So0HPyS
w32EPi2ooMkJ3QbRSS4dKnAKWmUU6nGwetAtTKXabaz4EEX9AgFsTSckAQuh5wm2
p99oA/tBCMajM+AX6HLaQb6LzqZxI9uiZi5eNZwGaq0h3GPQUoatdijDBcGs2k6H
OGfJhoMTs5aBgZhx/4waDTTSouKoVgJBbtOFAfINDVbAUieRPVYlbUXbBdYzShzG
3jeBPJoinU7K6KQuj6Q4wKSzJWE1T7SeXNrsJmqlc/o4dyHfHVGcAF7GeP+hzhY=
=Ix6O
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----