Registry First Aid Review

Software like Registry First Aid always claims to be a miracle solution to all your PC operating system woes when in fact it is usually useless and many times dangerous. Instead the Microsoft site has a free on line suite of tools in its Windows Live OneCare program that I use and recommend. Also, Microsoft's Security Essentials is a free, self-updating anti-virus program that is downloadable from Microsoft. I now use it & find it to be head &shoulders above Mcafee, Norton, Avast and others.In fact, I recommend that no PC user ever tries "solutions" like Registry First Aid as they range from being useless to dangerous. For that reason I did not download and use this software before writing this review. I have in the past & do use registry cleaners. I regularly used a free one and now use the free OneCare cleaners. The need for registry cleaners is this: Both Windows and third party Windows programs do an absolutely abysmal job of removing all the entries associated with uninstalled software. In fact, many of them after uninstallation leave behind l modules running in the background, taxing your computer's resources. Basically, a PC is a big box of advertising you brought into your home that Microsoft and others make the bulk of their income from. In fact, every piece of software installed runs in the background on your computer, whether it needs to or not, until you shut it off. So the most important thing a PC user can do to speed up and unclutter his/her computer is to run the "msconfig" utility in the computer and shut off all the startup items (far left tab) that don't need to be running all the time. To run msconfig, simply click "start" then look for "run" and click it, type in "msconfig" in the box (without quotes) an hit "ok", go to the far right tab and shut everything off. Okay, so that is a quick primer on the things that PC users should really be concerned with.
Getting back to Registry First Aid leads me to an important axiom that I've coined which is really just my experienced opinion: "The Best Software is Free". In fact, whenever I've compiled a list of software candidates for download, I have always found the very best one in the list to be the free one. In my experience, free software has always been superior for several reasons: first it does the task better and has never messed up my computer like pay software has. Secondly, believe it or not, it usually has better support! Yes, with free software there is no "logging in" to get support and the associated loss of your log-in info and the author is usually highly dedicated and updates regularly, whereas the for-profit companies eventually want you to "update" by buying a brand new product because they stopped supporting the one you bought. So I don't buy any software until after I can't find it for free. As a novice I was skeptical of anything free. "You get what you pay for" & "Too good to be true" came to mind. But in following those false axioms for finding software, I got burned time & again. To find free reliable software, I simply enter something like this in a good multi-source free search engine like Metacrawler: "free disc burning software," the critcal search words being "free" & "software."
Software like Registry First Aid usually claims it will "unclutter" your registry, speed up your computer, save hard drive space by discarding the unused registry entries and fix issues. All are lies. I will debunk these advertising myths one by one: First, excising unused registry entries will not recover usable space on your hard drive. That is because registry entries are merely text entry and text takes up very little space. I fact I've found every single PC "cleaner" to be dangerous, including the one embedded in Windows that you can run automatically to "clean up unused icons on your desktop" The Windows one will delete your shortcuts to programs so that you have to find and make another one on your desktop or even have to reinstall the software. The biggest claim is that a cluttered registry slows down your computer. This is simply not true. Tests of PCs with cluttered and uncluttered registries show absolutely no appreciable difference in speed. At the worst, a damaged entry will render a single piece of software useless. A damaged registry will usually prompts Windows to give you choices for fixing it. The most danger to anyone's PC is trojans, viruses and mall-ware that are rampant on the web. So I recommend the use of a firewall and these free services and software: Windows Live OneCare, Windows Security Essentials and SpyBot Search&Destroy, which has a shredder, a browser protector and Tea Timer, which is a script stopper (stops unauthorized programs from running commands on your computer without your consent). Here are the links:
http://onecare.live.com/site/en-us/default.htm
http://www.safer-networking.org/en/home/index.html
http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/
According to Wikipedia:
"Scareware comprises several classes of scam software with malicious payloads, or of limited or no benefit, that are sold to consumers via certain unethical marketing practices. The selling approach uses social engineering to cause shock, anxiety, or the perception of a threat, generally directed at an unsuspecting user. Some forms of spyware and adware also use scareware tactics."
"Legitimate registry cleaners, or registry cleanup software may improve the performance of computers by ridding the registry of redundant information."
Note the use of the word "may" here in comparison to the more emphatic reasons below for not using such software:
"Some registry cleaners make no distinction as to the severity of the errors, and many that do may erroneously categorize errors as 'critical' with little basis to support it—a modern form of snake oil.
Most notably, critics say there is no reliable way for a third party program to know whether any particular key is invalid, redundant or neither. Poorly designed registry cleaners may not know for sure whether a key is still being used by Windows or what detrimental effects removing it may have. This has led to examples of registry cleaners causing loss of functionality and/or system instability, as well as application compatibility updates from Microsoft to block problematic Registry cleaners."