Clean System Registry

Registry is the database of Windows, used to store data.
Over time, Windows Registry begins to hold data that is invalid or is dead. This invalid data eventually accumulate in the registry, slowing Windows down and causing other problems.

The Cleaner tool will cleanup your Registry by finding

• invalid paths
• invalid file associations
• invalid file types
• invalid ActiveX and COM
• obsolete software entries
• dead file extensions
• invalid application paths
• invalid help paths
• invalid fonts
• obsolete start menu order
• and all other dead entries through out the registry.

Usage

• Click the 'Scan' icon. Wait for the process to complete, when the 'Please wait' dialog box will be gone. You can cancel the scanning process by pressing the cancel Button or pressing Esc Key. The total number of invalid entries found and the number of entries ignored are reported on the bottom left.
• By default, all entries found are marked for deletion, since all found entries can be safely removed. If you are an expert, you can select those that you want to delete by check marking them. Select the entries and right click on them to see the context menu presenting various actions you can take.
• Click 'Remove' to delete all the check marked invalid entries.

Before scanning, You can make a backup of your System Registry using Windows Registry back up tool by clicking 'Backup whole registry' from the right click popup menu. Note that it is a silent process, and done by Windows. This backup is done through the command "scanregw.exe /BACKUP". You can restore your registry to the previous state by the command "scanregw.exe /RESTORE". Scanregw.exe may not be available for Windows NT/2k/XP. You must Backup whole registry before first using the cleaner.

Whenever you clean the Registry, a corresponding Undo file is generated for any changes made which can be used to recreate the entries deleted. From the Ace Utilities main window, click the Restore button which will take you to the Restore tool window. Click the Registry Cleaner tab, select the file to be merged back to the registry and click the Restore button. The undo-file will have its name related to the date and hour when it was created ;i.e., when the cleaning was done.

Suppose after scanning, you may want to exclude some entries. Select the entries, right click on it, and from the popup menu, click 'Exclude/Always' or 'Exclude/This time'. When you click 'Always', the item will be removed from the list (not deleted from registry) and it will be added to a ignore-list. The entry will not be listed again in the future. Clicking 'This time' removes the entry from the list.

By clicking 'Report', you can save the list as a text file.

The cleaner has a built-in ignore list to ignore certain unsafe entries. This makes it safer. Read about ignore lists for more information.