backing up registry

[jojo100]

hi
im thinking of dl easy clean to clean my registry, but the reviews of peeps who hav used this say to back up my registry b4 i do, but i dont know how to back up my registry. any help would great thanks.

[vehelpfulguy]

Unless you are having major problems running Registry cleaners is a waste of time and can do more harm than good.

Having a few entries in your registry that relate to old programs does not do that much harm as Windows usually just ignores them.

The best registry cleaner is to reinstall Windows.

http://www.edbott.com/weblog/archives/000643.h tml

http://www.edbott.com/weblog/archives/000643.h tml

[vehelpfulguy]

Sorry that should say:

Unless you are having major problems running Windows then Registry cleaners are a waste of time.....

[jojo100]

hi
thanks
pc is running slow i know my ram is rubbish, i only hav 192mb of ram, so thought if i clean things up and see how that goes b4 i get a higher ram installed, maybe that would help, but after reading that link u sent dont know now. thanks again.

[alfgbt]

192 0f ram is very low indeed these days & without doubt you system will have a struggle to cope . VH guy is correct as registry cleaners can t be trusted to remove just rubbish entries.you can however defrag the registy to get it running smoother. Upgrade your ram for now you will find a great improvement I am sure.

[boobesque]

defrag the registry?
defrag the hard drive. I'm sure that's what alfgbt meant. and dont use windows disk defragment tool if you have access to a 3rd party application. windows defrag is a bit crap.

[alfgbt]

No I meant defrag the registry ?.

[boobesque]

the registry doesnt get fragmented. it is the files on the hard drive as files are saved to the first available space so deleting a file creates a spare bit of space which will be used the next time you install a program or whatever. many 'holes' in your hard drive will cause an installation to install into these holes which will slow the running of said program as the hard drive has to scan the whole drive for each part of the program.

The registry is a logical store of system information. it doesnt fragment as entries in the LOCAL_PC subtree will always be in LOCAL_PC

[alfgbt]

Yes point taken, but the registry does get bloated, & full of deleted entrys which leaves big holes. Hence programs like http://www.acelogix.com/regcompact.html
& various articles http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/ Utilities/PageDefrag.mspx