How to manually clean a registry?

June 27, 2006 3:37 PM

How hard is it to do a manual registry cleaning and is it worth paying HP $45 to help me?

i can't reinstall the linksys usb wireless adapter on my brother's HP desktop. First they told me to download a program to do a registry cleanup, which i did (Advanced System Optimizer). Since that didn't work, and the adapter works on my laptop fine, they said i need to go into the registry and take out the offending bits by hand, and that HP would walk me through it. I called HP and they said it'd cost $45 but I could barely understand what the lady was saying. I tried googling but it didn't really get me anywhere because i'm not really sure what i'm looking for. But i get the feeling that this is a common problem.

So here are my questions
- how hard is this? can i do it by myself? (I'm not technologically phobic but i don't have alot of knowledge, especially about computer guts) I forgot to ask Lynksys what exactly i'm looking for in there.
- is $45 a reasonable price for somebody to fix it for me?
- can anybody recommend a better service than HP tech support for this sort of thing? (i'm in suffolk county, ny)
- any other help you can think of

thank you!

posted by amethysts to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Best answer: You should be able to do the manual cleaning yourself, paying for a walkthrough seems excessive to me. Just make sure you make a backup before messing with the registry, that way you can restore it if you run into trouble.

Do you get an error message when trying to install the adapter? I found this guide - You Cannot Install Driver Files for Your Network Adapter and You Receive a "Cannot Install This Hardware" Error Message - that sounds applicable. It has a step-by-step walkthrough, similar to what HP support would likely have you do.

Again, make sure to back up the registry (it's part of the above instructions) before deleting anything.
posted by gemmy at 4:24 PM on June 27, 2006

Response by poster: Gemmy, thank you, that is the exact problem that i'm having. I just realized how vague my question was so i am kind of amazed that you found it.
I will print this out and go through all of the steps. I still sort of wish there were somebody trustworthy i could call and talk to (for free) but, this is still a huge help.
posted by amethysts at 4:43 PM on June 27, 2006

Why can't you reinstall? Why do you need to reinstall? Please be as descriptive as possible, I highly doubt this is a difficult thing to fix and someone can explain what you need to do so you don't have to pay $45 to listen to someone who you can't even understand in the first place.
posted by crypticgeek at 4:43 PM on June 27, 2006

Also, if gemmy's link doesn't do it for you and if you know a date when it was working correctly, you can try going back to a system restore point you know is good.
posted by crypticgeek at 4:44 PM on June 27, 2006

Response by poster: OK yeah, I need to reinstall because i was having some wireless network problems which i think sort of resolved themselves.. anyway, my laptop started cooperating again, but the HP didn't so i figured it might be the adapter. Also the adapter stopped showing up where it lists all of your network connections.

Usually whenever something just "stops working", i try to uninstall/reinstall and that usually either fixes it or points out a way to approach the problem.
posted by amethysts at 4:49 PM on June 27, 2006