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Nope! Do registry fixers or cleaners really work? There is much controversy over the usefulness of the many third-party registry cleaner utilities on the market today, or the concept of registry cleaning in relation to improving a PC's overall performance and stability. In theory cleaning your system's registry could have some benefit to the underlying operation of Windows, however with modern Windows operating systems cleaning the registry is automatically handled by the OS. While in the past some registry errors could lead to annoying pop-ups or various stability issues, Microsoft has done a superb job in auto-correcting this for you without the need to manually make any registry "fixes". Boost on the other hand does not clean your registry (Boost will auto-fix some invalid registry entries however), instead Boost attacks your PC's performance problem directly by addressing the poor performing applications that are truly causing your PC to become sluggish and unstable.

If you are considering buying a third-party registry 'fixer' program, please think about the following:

• Registry size reduction: There is a popular misconception that the value of registry cleaning lies in reducing "registry bloat". Even a neglected registry will seldom contain more than two or three thousand redundant entries. Bearing in mind that the modern registry may contain more than a million entries, the elimination of two or three thousand is not going to save any noticeable amount of scanning time.

• Registry damage: Some registry cleaners make no distinction as to the severity of the errors, and many that do may erroneously categorize errors as "critical" with little basis to support it. Removing or changing certain registry data can prevent the system from starting, or cause application errors and crashes. It is not always possible for a third party program to know whether any particular key is invalid or redundant. A poorly-designed registry cleaner may not be equipped to know for sure whether a key is still being used by Windows or what detrimental effects removing it may have. This may lead to loss of functionality and/or system instability, as well as application compatibility updates from Microsoft to block problematic registry cleaners.

• Performance benefits: On Windows 9x computers, it was possible that a very large registry could slow down the computer's startup time. However this is less of an issue with NT-based operating systems (XP, VIsta, 7 and 8) due to a different on-disk structure of the registry, improved memory management and indexing. Slowdown due to registry bloat is thus far less of an issue in modern versions of Windows.

• Application virtualization: A registry cleaner is of no use for cleaning registry entries associated with a virtualised application since all registry entries in this scenario are written to an application-specific virtual registry instead of the real one. Complications of detailed interactions of real-mode with virtual also leaves the potential for incorrect removal of shortcuts and registry entries that point to "disappeared" files, and consequent confusion by the user of cleaner products. There is little competent information about this specific interaction, and no integration. In general, even if registry cleaners could be arguably considered safe in a normal end-user environment, they should be avoided in an application virtualization environment.

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