RegCure Review

RegCure Review

www.regcure.com

Older versions of Windows are still notorious for accumulating huge amounts of obsolete and invalid entries in the registry, all of them leading to the computer's painful (for the user) crash. All these entries did nothing but slow the system down and ultimately led to creating third party instruments designed to eliminate the junk in the registry.

The past year was a boom in developing such tools, either freeware or commercial. They come in different shapes and looks and they all strive to leave behind a nice and clean registry and a computer that works better. Everything the user has to do is pick the right one. Unfortunately there isn't one that performs the ultimate sweep in the registry leaving it clean as a whistle and that is why I advise you to use more than one such utility on your computer. You will see that while two of them discover only 12-20 errors in the registry, running a third one would boost the number to 100 invalid entries.

The reason for this is that not all of them look in the same areas of the registry and not all the errors are critical for your computer. Some of them are eliminated by Windows, while others are absolutely harmless and do not hinder your system's performance one bit.

RegCure comes to enlarge the list of options in this sense and its price tag reads $29.95 and the trial version will not allow you to eliminate all the errors in your system as only some areas are unrestricted (Windows Fonts and File Associations). Be sure that the unrestricted areas are the least stringent to be cleaned.

The interface is absolutely great as it is clean cut and fits perfectly the new Vista operating system. There are no integration issues and the colors give the application a corporate aspect that contributes to trusting the results it throws after the scan.

The options are arranged vertically to the left side while in the right part the contents of each menu are displayed. The first option available is Scan and it enables you to select the areas of the registry you want to be scanned for errors. The list is quite large and comprehensive as it includes entries left behind software uninstall, shared DLLs, application paths, startup items, program shortcuts, COM/ActiveX entries, empty registry keys and others of less importance like file associations and Windows Fonts.

Going into Settings the application proves to be quite poor at this chapter but the choices made available compensate for the variety. The three tabs located in the top right hand part of the window cover General Settings, Ignore List and Scheduling. The palette of options lets the user configure the application to close after the repair of the registry has finished, repair the items immediately after scanning or create a restore point before proceeding to performing any repairs. The last two alternatives are related to updating the program. This can be done automatically and the user can be prompted before downloading the update.

Ignore list can be created only after the scan has been performed. From the list of errors found you can select the entries you want to be skipped at future scans. All there is to it is press "Ignore" button and the files will be automatically added to the Ignore List.

If you are forgetful enough and fail to remember to clean the registry of your computer, the application will provide a schedule function and programming it to run a scan at a certain time is a cinch. The task can be programmed to take place one time only or to recur between a certain time interval.

As the backup is created automatically before repairing the registry, you won't have to update the files every time you clean the registry. Restoring it is also possible directly from the application and it can store more than one backup so that you can go back to an older time if the problems persist.

RegCure is equipped with a very shallow startup manager. It has little options available, but it performs the basic functions of such a tool. The user can only enable and disable the startup processes and to remove them from the list.

The last menu in the application window is Results. The name says it all as it displays the outcome of the last scan of the registry. It displays the registry items, number of errors detected, how many of them have been eliminated and how many have been sent to Ignore List. At the bottom of the screen there is the overall conclusion saying how many errors have been found and the number of fixed ones.

As the images below show, the number of errors found on the test system is fairly large. Alarmed by the total value, I decided to run a scan with three other tools, both freeware and commercial. Surprisingly or not, they found between 12 and 20 invalid registry files. The reason is that none of them covered Empty Registry Items, which contained the largest part of the errors. Also, there were many errors in File/Path Reference so I proceeded to manually delete them from the registry and started a new scan. This time the results were better. Out of 84 errors in this area RegCure managed to detect only 78 (despite the fact that I must have deleted over a dozen of entries).

The Good

The application looks good and integrates perfectly in Vista shell. All the menus and options are in plain view and easy to access.

The scan is fast and the areas covered are quite important.

The Bad

RegCure manages to detect huge numbers of errors in the registry. However, not all of them are fatal to your system and not all of them will contribute to your system's low performance.

The trial version does not allow cleaning all the areas of the registry so there is a bit of a problem evaluating the elimination capabilities of the application. Leaving two of the most harmless areas unrestricted for cleaning is not at all helping.

The Truth

The application is overzealous in doing its job, but that should not be a problem. However, displaying such large values for detected errors may scare the users a little and all those invalids may not all contribute to the system's degradation in time.
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