It was always junk. 'Cleaning' the registry, which has always been snake oil at best and potentially break Windows at worst. Even Microsoft doesn't recommend registry cleaners.
The only disk cleaning tools you need are provided in Windows by default.
10+ years ago it was okay. Today, not so much. And while the registry "cleaning" might never have been "useful", I did use it on a "why not" basis and didn't have an issue, ever. Also noticed no positive effects.
But either way, the Microsoft that makes random hardware demands for Windows 11 to turn computers into landfill isn't what I would take recommendations from. Or much anyone else, either. Just by using Revo Uninstaller I am just constantly amazed at how much stuff software leaves around in the registry and on disk. I recently uninstalled Keybase because I wasn't really using it but noticed it had accumulated 200MB of log files (for nothing, for running in the background basically), and after uninstalling it, RU found an additional 400+ MB of leftover files. And that just rubs me the wrong way, and even if it doesn't measurably slow down the use of the system, just having all sorts of orphaned and 100% useless data checked for changes every time a backup runs is reason enough for me to get rid of it.
FWIW, my system doesn't seem to get slower over time, and I do attribute that to caring too much about and fiddling with things I'm not supposed to care about. I don't recommend it to others -- if you know enough and care enough to do it, you're doing it already -- but you can pry that from my cold, dead hands.
Systems don't really get slower over time because of used disk space. It used to be somewhat true when HDDs, and bad ones at that, were more common. Nowadays though what's left on your 2 TB <$70 2 GB/s SSD storage matters little so long as your drive isn't near completely out of space to the point it can't place things easily. Background apps/injections are another thing though. You can never uninstall an app for 10 years and your computer will be none the slower for it as long as you disable them from automatically starting up, loading 5 background services all the time, and having poorly written hooks into things like Explorer which constantly get loaded every time you open a file dialog.
Tinkering for tinkering's sake can definitely be fun though and there's nothing wrong with that. Sometimes poking at things, and sometimes breaking them, is a great way to learn new things or even just scratch a casual itch.
Yeah I kinda conflated two things there. One thing is that do I do poke at things a lot, I regularly run Sysinternals autoruns just out of curiosity -- which also "can potentially break windows" (what can't?), poke around in Process Explorer or even run Process Monitor occasionally to just filter out everything for which I know the reason, to see what else is going on. I remove stuff from context menus I don't want there, you name it. All those little things do add up, even if it just reduces the number of things I have to scroll past when doing other things. But I admit that I mostly enjoy doing it.
But while SSD changed everything obviously, in addition to daily partition-based backups I also make manual backups to my NAS with FreeFileSync, just so I don't have to restore full disks when I only want to pull a few files from the backup. While FFS is crazy fast checking for changed files, all those orphaned files are still not free... it's not about the size so much as about the number of files, doubly so when it goes over the network. I also rather often search my whole system for stuff, and there too, files and directories that don't exist are the quickest to search.
I wouldn't want to keep them around in the same way I wouldn't want to run a script that puts 100k tiny files with random content all over the place. Because it's just a pointless waste. And since I enjoy the process, I don't count the time I am using on that, so in my mind, I'm being frugal in a weird, misguided sort of way... I know I could spend the time to make more money and then just buy another HD, but I don't wanna :P
Especially when you make your own cleaners [0][1], which you can also can selectively invoke via the command line (and of course do that via schedule / cron etc.)
Is there anything to indicate this is a trustworthy application?
This is a closed-source binary, which has carte blanche access once you click "Yes" on the UAC prompt.
Basically, yes. I think we've all come to expect freeware to also be free (libre) software. I certainly am in favor of free software as well, but I think that we assume at this point that if you aren't making money from it and you aren't releasing the code, you have something to hide. However, the interesting thing is that back in the day, shareware was often closed source unless you paid to register it, in which case you got access to the code (depending on the publisher, obviously).
I don’t recall any shareware back then having open source access to the dos,windows programs just floppy disk shared binaries. The reality was before the always on internet and broadband speeds, malware was very rare, but viruses were ubiquitous on shared floppies but more of nuisance. Floppies with shareware by named distributors we’re unlikely to have virus unlike online boards or floppies handed around student to student back in the day.
I just got done reading a book called "Shareware Heroes" that mentioned various shareware apps providing source code to users who registered. The free versions never had source provided; the source was advertised as a perk for paid users. It's different than what we expect today, but honestly not the worst business model out there.
It's possible, but would you really be surprised if you installed it and later discovered it contained spyware/malware?
I would be surprised if I got something from a well-known, reputable company that turned out to be malware. Something from an Internet rando? Not so much.
This is true for most home users, sure. But if the tool is useful then it has a use in many industries with Windows systems, so someone can be paid to review the source.
I used to “burn it down and reinstall” without much worry but, sometime in the Win 8 to Win 10 transition era, I became very hesitant to doing it. Not sure why.
Ironically, Windows 10 and 11 easily have the smoothest install of any version of Windows ever.
I'm in the same camp as you are, I don't reinstall as much now as I did 20 years ago. But a lot of that is because Windows had a habit of getting really bogged down, in 2003, but these days it's pretty solid.
It's still a mystery to me why every other version of Windows is terrible.
"Good Windows:" Windows 3.11, Windows 98, Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows 10
"Bad Windows:" Windows 95, Windows ME, Windows Vista, Windows 8, Windows 11
I'm ready to rollback to Windows 10, Windows 11 just features dumb "features", like a new context menu that includes Skype but doesn't include "copy" or "paste"
> Ironically, Windows 10 and 11 easily have the smoothest install of any version of Windows ever.
Since introduction of WIM it's the same for all versions. WIM was introduced with Vista.
> It's still a mystery to me why every other version of Windows is terrible.
Because you conditioned yourself on the meme-train. There is no 'bad' Windows, there are just new versions which were needed to pave their way for the new tech.
Chicago really pushed the availability of the computer for Average Joe.
Millenium was a swan song for 9x line and included a bunch of tech from the business line to improve the reliability of the OS, including Automatic Updates, which were promptly disabled by k3w1 h4x0rs to 'save resources' and to 'fuck with Bill'.
Vista had a ton of internal changes like integrity levels, new WDM and WDDM (finally the graphic drivers crash didn't mean 100% reboot of the system), totally revamped WinSxS (I think you forgot what DLL Hell was - Vista is the OS what hit the nail in the coffin) and a ton and ton of things what you probably think came in Win7. It didn't help what MS didn't manage to tell the OEMs to fuck off with their shitstock and hence - 'Vista Ready', using 4200RPM drives with 512Mb of RAM. In 2007.
Win8 was a difficult beast, which should had transform the human-computer interaction but again manufacturers told MS to fuck off and that's why there is still only 10% of notebooks with a touchscreen on the market. Everyone shat on Windows Store while simultaneously happily blowing the walled garden of iOS (and Play Market and Steam were a thing too, for years at that moment).
Win11... yeah, this is shit. The development was taken over by pumpkin latte guys with McAirs who for sure doesn't eat their own dogfood.
Also people forget (or don't even know) on what awful hardware Windows runs sometimes yet it's always Gates himself who is at fault what a cheapass Shitsco 9999 with a bubblegum instead of a thermal paste BSODed again. Hey, man, if you got IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL that it's 90% hardware, 10% drivers of the said hardware. Mac fanboys really love to boast about stability of their shiny overpriced shit, without even thinking about how many variations of HW (even without HW revisions) there are for Apple computers and for Windows computers.
Don't use this, it has a lot of riskware as part of the toolset. Win10/11 has ok-ish backup/restore with a nice UI. Better to use that than shove all this mess in there.
FYI: if you insist, use MRT not any of these risky security softwares. But if you insist, malwarebytes is the only one i would ever get near.
44 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] threadThe only disk cleaning tools you need are provided in Windows by default.
But either way, the Microsoft that makes random hardware demands for Windows 11 to turn computers into landfill isn't what I would take recommendations from. Or much anyone else, either. Just by using Revo Uninstaller I am just constantly amazed at how much stuff software leaves around in the registry and on disk. I recently uninstalled Keybase because I wasn't really using it but noticed it had accumulated 200MB of log files (for nothing, for running in the background basically), and after uninstalling it, RU found an additional 400+ MB of leftover files. And that just rubs me the wrong way, and even if it doesn't measurably slow down the use of the system, just having all sorts of orphaned and 100% useless data checked for changes every time a backup runs is reason enough for me to get rid of it.
FWIW, my system doesn't seem to get slower over time, and I do attribute that to caring too much about and fiddling with things I'm not supposed to care about. I don't recommend it to others -- if you know enough and care enough to do it, you're doing it already -- but you can pry that from my cold, dead hands.
Tinkering for tinkering's sake can definitely be fun though and there's nothing wrong with that. Sometimes poking at things, and sometimes breaking them, is a great way to learn new things or even just scratch a casual itch.
But while SSD changed everything obviously, in addition to daily partition-based backups I also make manual backups to my NAS with FreeFileSync, just so I don't have to restore full disks when I only want to pull a few files from the backup. While FFS is crazy fast checking for changed files, all those orphaned files are still not free... it's not about the size so much as about the number of files, doubly so when it goes over the network. I also rather often search my whole system for stuff, and there too, files and directories that don't exist are the quickest to search.
I wouldn't want to keep them around in the same way I wouldn't want to run a script that puts 100k tiny files with random content all over the place. Because it's just a pointless waste. And since I enjoy the process, I don't count the time I am using on that, so in my mind, I'm being frugal in a weird, misguided sort of way... I know I could spend the time to make more money and then just buy another HD, but I don't wanna :P
https://pcmanager-en.microsoft.com/
Especially when you make your own cleaners [0][1], which you can also can selectively invoke via the command line (and of course do that via schedule / cron etc.)
[0] https://docs.bleachbit.org/cml/cleanerml.html
[1] https://github.com/bleachbit/cleanerml/tree/master
I only see this attitude within open source circles (eg: this place). Most people couldn't care less, for better or worse.
They are being scrutinised for a reason.
And that reason is the in the very nature of the software. What it does, and what it wants access to on the system and so on.
Such is the circle of life for system utilities in Windows land.
I would be surprised if I got something from a well-known, reputable company that turned out to be malware. Something from an Internet rando? Not so much.
-Open source enthusiast, probably.
I'm in the same camp as you are, I don't reinstall as much now as I did 20 years ago. But a lot of that is because Windows had a habit of getting really bogged down, in 2003, but these days it's pretty solid.
It's still a mystery to me why every other version of Windows is terrible.
"Good Windows:" Windows 3.11, Windows 98, Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows 10
"Bad Windows:" Windows 95, Windows ME, Windows Vista, Windows 8, Windows 11
I'm ready to rollback to Windows 10, Windows 11 just features dumb "features", like a new context menu that includes Skype but doesn't include "copy" or "paste"
WHY WOULD I WANT SKYPE IN MY CONTEXT MENU??
check out autoruns [0] for easily cleaning context menu, startup junk, etc.
[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/aut...
Since introduction of WIM it's the same for all versions. WIM was introduced with Vista.
> It's still a mystery to me why every other version of Windows is terrible.
Because you conditioned yourself on the meme-train. There is no 'bad' Windows, there are just new versions which were needed to pave their way for the new tech.
Chicago really pushed the availability of the computer for Average Joe.
Millenium was a swan song for 9x line and included a bunch of tech from the business line to improve the reliability of the OS, including Automatic Updates, which were promptly disabled by k3w1 h4x0rs to 'save resources' and to 'fuck with Bill'.
Vista had a ton of internal changes like integrity levels, new WDM and WDDM (finally the graphic drivers crash didn't mean 100% reboot of the system), totally revamped WinSxS (I think you forgot what DLL Hell was - Vista is the OS what hit the nail in the coffin) and a ton and ton of things what you probably think came in Win7. It didn't help what MS didn't manage to tell the OEMs to fuck off with their shitstock and hence - 'Vista Ready', using 4200RPM drives with 512Mb of RAM. In 2007.
Win8 was a difficult beast, which should had transform the human-computer interaction but again manufacturers told MS to fuck off and that's why there is still only 10% of notebooks with a touchscreen on the market. Everyone shat on Windows Store while simultaneously happily blowing the walled garden of iOS (and Play Market and Steam were a thing too, for years at that moment).
Win11... yeah, this is shit. The development was taken over by pumpkin latte guys with McAirs who for sure doesn't eat their own dogfood.
Also people forget (or don't even know) on what awful hardware Windows runs sometimes yet it's always Gates himself who is at fault what a cheapass Shitsco 9999 with a bubblegum instead of a thermal paste BSODed again. Hey, man, if you got IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL that it's 90% hardware, 10% drivers of the said hardware. Mac fanboys really love to boast about stability of their shiny overpriced shit, without even thinking about how many variations of HW (even without HW revisions) there are for Apple computers and for Windows computers.
FYI: if you insist, use MRT not any of these risky security softwares. But if you insist, malwarebytes is the only one i would ever get near.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=990...