The worst of the breed are products that advertise and encourage a 'free' Registry scan however, the user typically finds the product has to be purchased for a substantial sum, before it will effect any of the anticipated 'repairs'. The rogue security software ' WinFixer' including Registry cleaners has been ranked as one of the most prevalent pieces of malware currently in circulation. Rogue Registry cleaners are often marketed with alarmist advertisements that falsely claim to have pre-analyzed your PC, displaying bogus warnings to take 'corrective' action hence the descriptive label ' scareware'. In October 2008, Microsoft and the Washington attorney general filed a lawsuit against two Texas firms, Branch Software and Alpha Red, producers of the 'Registry Cleaner XP' scareware. The lawsuit alleges that the company sent incessant pop-ups resembling system warnings to consumers' personal computers stating 'CRITICAL ERROR MESSAGE! - REGISTRY DAMAGED AND CORRUPTED', before instructing users to visit a web site to download Registry Cleaner XP at a cost of $39.95. On Windows 9x computers, it was possible that a very large Registry could slow down the computer's start-up time.

However this is less of an issue with NT-based operating systems (including Windows XP and Vista), due to a different on-disk structure of the Registry, improved memory management, and indexing.

CNET MAC MEMORY CLEANER WINDOWSįurthermore, versions of Windows prior to Server 2003 may fail to start up if the Registry and kernel files are unable to fit within the first 16 MB of memory. Slowdown due to Registry bloat is thus far less of an issue in modern versions of Windows.Ĭonversely, defragmenting the underlying Registry files (e.g.

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