Defrag your registry -- you're doing it

Smart people may debate whether or not you should use a registry cleaner. Some people swear by them; others warn you to stay away from them. But whichever side of that debate you fall on, it is certainly true that during normal Windows operation, data is constantly being written to and deleted from the registry. Over time, just like the rest of your drive, the data in the registry becomes fragmented. So those fragments and wasted space in the registry need to be cleaned up to improve your system's performance. Some have even put together "special" utilities to defragment the registry. But PerfectDisk can move the registry hives online, so when you're defrgmenting your entire drive with PerfectDisk, you're defragmenting your registry.

Why is this woman smiling?  Looks to me like she's just had her registry defragmented.

               

Comments

[Michael]

Thanks for getting rid of no-follow so it’s worth my while comnmenting. Happy 2011.

[best registry cleaner]

Another reason to buy a Mac.

[Registry Cleaner Reviews]

Hi there. Thanks for the great info on your site, I'll bookmark it for later :-) I've got some great reviews on registry cleaners on my blog, so feel free to take a look. Thanks very much!

[PerfectDisk]

Hi Registry Cleaner,

Thanks for the comment and glad you've eliminated your crashes. Hope you're defragging too!

Thanks,
Joe

[registry cleaner]

I recently purchased a registry cleaner and must say my pc is working much better. I use to get errors and crashes. All gone now! :)

[PerfectDisk]

Hi Scott,

Thanks for the comment and keeping on me. You're right...I was trying to make the point that PerfectDisk can defrag the registry hives online, but I probably could have done it a lot better (and made the server $100 instead of $99 at the same time...:).

Thanks again,
Joe

[scott]

Thank you. But the original comment included the sentences "Over time, just like the rest of your drive, the data in the registry becomes fragmented. So those fragments and wasted space in the registry need to be cleaned up to improve your system's performance." These lines (especially the second one) seem to reference internal registry structures, not the hive files themselves.

As far as the "OS configuration manager" keeping the registry virtual structures compact, I'm not sure if it really does at all or how well it does--every time I compact my registry using NTREGOPT or Registry Workshop, I see pretty significant reductions in wasted space (sometimes well over 80% reductions).

But it doesn't really matter... I understand the point is that PerfectDisk can defrag the registry hives online, which is nice.

[PerfectDisk]

Hi Scott,

Thanks for your comment.

There are 2 aspects of the registry internals which can effect the performance:

1) the fragmentation of hive files and
2) the internal structures of the registry data.

(2) has is optimized by the OS configuration manager; it keeps the internal data structures as compact and optimized as it can.

In the post, I was referring to (1), the hive files which PerfectDisk compacts during the online optimization pass.

For a point of reference, please see:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/pagedefrag.mspx

..................
When you run PageDefrag (pagedfrg.exe), you will be presented a listbox that tells you how many clusters make up your paging files, event log files, and Registry hives (SAM, SYSTEM, SYSTEM.ALT, SECURITY, SOFTWARE, .DEFAULT), as well as how many fragments those files are in. If you feel that these files are fragmented enough to warrant a shot at defragmenting them, or if you want to defragment them at every boot, select the appropriate radio button choice and click OK.
..................

It defrags registry hives at boot time. PerfectDisk does it during the online pass.

Sorry for any confusion.

Thanks,
Joe

[scott]

Defragmenting registry hive files on disk is not at all the same thing as defragmenting the virtual content of the registry within a loaded hive. So, this blog entry makes no sense whatsoever to me.