Substitute for Registry Mechanic?
November 19, 2011 4:14 PM   Subscribe

I've been using Registry Mechanic. The last version was the best yet, but then PC Tools was bought by Symantec. They have produced a new version, which is crap. Is there another good program that does what RegMech used to do?

The new one is so bad that I went back to the previous version. That's fine, except I keep getting a popup alert that there is a new version available. It stays in front of all other windows, and the Close button on it does nothing. I can only close it by rebooting or using the Task Manager.

The support people say they can't do anything about it until the next version. I am not confident that that version will be any better than their latest one, so I'm looking for another Registry tool. It's OK if I have to pay, but one license should cover a few different machines.
posted by Kirth Gerson to Computers & Internet (8 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
Best answer: I've been using Eusing Registry Cleaner as a freeware alternative to RegMech for the last five years or so.
posted by No Shmoobles at 4:24 PM on November 19, 2011


Best answer: CCleaner is free and does the job for me. It also does lots of other maintenence work, like cleaning files, application caches, reset settings, etc.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 4:29 PM on November 19, 2011


Best answer: There was a pretty good thread right here on Ask just the other day that might help. There were a lot of notes from techs and such with links to good free stuff.

Ask #200928 - Is this a reasonable test of registry cleaner effectiveness

On a related note, I was using the RM previous version and thought it was so-so. It never really seemed to fix what I wanted and always listed my registry health as medium. I did the free update this weekend and I have to say it is a real improvement. However, I am with you on than annoying popup. I wish I could dismiss it for a month at a time.
posted by lampshade at 5:13 PM on November 19, 2011


I switched to System Mechanic, and I like it a lot.
posted by bearwife at 8:08 PM on November 19, 2011


Response by poster: Thanks for the suggestions. I will try some out.

lampshade, with the old version, I found that compacting the Registry made the System Health meter go from Medium to High.

A couple of the things on the new version that I don't like are the way its default settings change stuff I didn't want changed. It rearranged the icons on my desktop. I had them set up in what were logical (to me) groups, but it blew that up. It erased all my login cookies, so I had to re-enter my username and password on every website. If the update had imported the settings from the old version, I assume that would not have happened. Having it clean out wherever my desktop settings are is kind of dumb, and not a feature.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 5:15 AM on November 20, 2011


compacting the Registry made the System Health meter go from Medium to High.


Ha! well I guess you can tell that I never compacted my registry!

FWIW, this weekend I have been fighting with an MS Office re-install gone all haywire. Anyway, it ended up involving some manual registry editing and I ended up using a few registry cleaners after manually editing stuff. The one thing I learned - or was reminded of again - is that it helps not only to run the cleaners more than once but also use a couple of different ones. Doing so actually got the problem resolved (along with some great advice from the msfn.org forums),
posted by lampshade at 8:37 AM on November 20, 2011


Response by poster: Oh, and by "compacting," I meant "optimizing," if there is any difference. RegMech calls it optimizing.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 5:39 AM on November 26, 2011


Response by poster: So, since posting this question, I've been using CCCleaner and the old version of Registry Mechanic. CCCleaner is much faster than RM, but it leaves the files that IE collects in place, while RM deletes them. Since those are records that IE makes of every file I open, even though I never use IE at all, I want them gone.

Since I upgraded Firefox to 8, RM has been deleting my Firefox profile, so I have to reopen the Bookmarks toolbar after I run RM.

Also, by "optimizing," above, I meant "defragmenting." This time, I mean it. Really. I just went and checked, and it is defragmenting. Trust me.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 2:30 PM on December 20, 2011


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