14 DAY TRIAL // Every computer user has faced sluggish performance and error screens with more or less frequency. In order to eliminate the effect you have to first to find the cause. In this case one element definitely leading to these computer symptoms is the registry. Many users do not pay it the deserved attention and all of a sudden the PC starts acting tired and responds in unusual ways: error screens, application crashes, more frequent blue screens and low performance.
It's not that the technology in them wears out. It's just lack of maintenance that makes them misbehave. So practically this happens because you did not take care of them. The solution? A re-install of the operating system does the trick just fine, but it is too damn time consuming with all the applications you have to install afterwards.
Cleaning your registry entries and optimizing them leads to better performance and less errors and crashes. The Internet houses a myriad of tools that can help you with this issue to a certain extent. Baku is another one to add to your collection. It is absolutely free and quite easy to use, despite of the drab interface and lack of color.
All the options are at quick grab in the upper part of the application window. The first button is multi-functional and is designed to compact the registry, import registry elements or export them. According to the developer, registry compacting will recreate each hive "from scratch" and any slack space is thus eliminated. The contents of the registry are not modified in any way and the files are not physically defragmented during the process. The registry hives are simply compacted to the minimum size possible.
During our testing compacting brought a bit more torque to the testing computer and the speed was visible after registry compacting.
As to the other two options available these are available in Windows Registry Editor as well and do exactly what they say. Importing adds more items to the registry while exporting makes a copy of the entire registry. The two can be used for creating registry backups.
Next in line is Restore function. Before eliminating invalid registry entries Baku creates a copy of them for safety reasons. This way, if something goes wrong after the cleaning you can always restore the deleted items and reconstruct the registry to its anterior state. Baku saves multiple sessions and you will have to manually delete the oldest ones.
The three main functions Baku has been built for are removing junk files from your computer, stripping the registry of errors and resolving application MRU lists. All three operations are wizard-assisted so there will be absolutely no trouble at all performing any of them.
Unneeded files procedure allows you to delete empty folders, files in use on reboot, preventing the recovery of deleted files, flushing Recycle Bin, delete temporary files folder, search for shortcuts to missing files and folders, temporaries modified in the last 48 hours (Windows generally keeps temporary files for as much as 48 hours by default) and Windows log files.
Baku will detect all the storage devices connected to your computer and the user can select which of them should be scanned. The great part is that you can modify the default list of junk files the program makes available. You can add new file extensions as well as delete those in the list. This way you get total control on what Baku will search for.
Unfortunately the application will not delete all the files. During our testing it happened multiple times for Baku not to be able to delete most of the files (according to the statistics at the end of the process at the first attempt it left behind 98% of the junk, at the second there was a full 100% and at the third attempt 100% again). Also, we created some bogus empty files which were not in use neither by the system, nor by any application and still could not be eliminated. In fact they had not even been detected. All these tests were performed on XP because on Vista it kept crashing when scanning for junk files.
Upon testing the application on a different Vista equipped system it successfully removed the junk files we created, although it still had its non-responsive times. Also, not all the files were deleted and it seems that Baku scans for empty folders only at the surface as it could not detect an empty folder sheltered by a directory.
System registry scan also provides the means of enabling certain types of files, according to your needs. By default Baku will treat zero bytes files as invalid and search for ActiveX/COM components, check application paths, file types associations, Windows fonts, orphaned help files, unused icon files, obsolete keys, sound files, left-overs from incomplete uninstalls, and Windows installer files. All these types will most definitely garner hundreds of junk registry items on a poorly maintained system, but do not worry as many of them are not critical for the well performance of the PC (but contribute to its inefficiency).
Registry cleaning is done responsibly and the application roots out lots of invalid files, but if you think that some registry sections are omitted (Start menu, Startup, System Drivers, DLLs or MUI cache)you are a bit wrong. The developer assures that all these areas are included by Baku during ActiveX/COM and MUI cache scans.
MRU list scanning is designed to erase all information on the recently used files. This tool partially failed during our testing. Although it managed to delete recent documents list in some applications (but only after enabling heuristics), Windows Recent Items folders remained untouched, just like browser history and cookies.
The Good
The application does a good job with cleaning the registry. It is 100% freeware and very easy to use. Baku makes a copy of the registry items before deleting them. In case of trouble you can restore them back.
The Bad
Registry cleaning is the best tool in the application but covers too few registry sections. Junk files cleaning and MRU lists elimination are a disaster as they will not eliminate a great chink of files. On Vista, if you're disk(s) are a bit older and you enable the scan on all of them the application will crash. If you scan and clean them one at a time there will be no trouble.
Using wildcards when adding a new extension is a must in Baku when scanning for junk files. Otherwise the file formats will not be picked up.
The Truth
The application is not top notch, but it has a small installer and can come in handy at some points. However, I suggest making some tests before using it on a regular basis. On my system and XP testing machine it performed almost execrably with junk file scanning when all the drives were enabled, but taking each one at a time resulted in a pretty good job.
NOTE: Empty folders are now deleted recursively. That is if you have a directory containing an empty folder containing another empty folder all three of them will be deleted.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
