14 DAY TRIAL // Whenever you're injured, a first aid kit comes in really handy. There are situations when your computer feels a little sick and does not act right. This is because of the installed softwares that after uninstall still leave their traces in the Registry.
Most users just reinstall the operating system which is a very good thing as it will erase all the data from your C: drive and you can start from scratch with a fresh, clean computer.
But at some point you will get tired of installing fresh copies of Windows. I know I did. I used to reinstall my operating system almost every three months. So what can you do about it? I turned to cleaning the Registry myself and it was not such a great idea as I ended up reinstalling the OS again.
After a little reading I discovered that there are some softwares that do that job far better than me. They clean up your Registry so that your computer won't move slow or worse, freeze.
Registry First Aid is developed by Rose City Software and is designed to correct the registry entries of the uninstalled files. The software's installation file is 2.71MB large and the application will eat up about 11MB of the computer memory.
The application's wizard like interface allows easy access to the options. The main window is divided into three main sections: Registry Maintenance, Registry Management and Registry Backup. One would say that these options are enough coming from such a software.
But things get more complicated than you'd think. The Registry Maintenance section contains the registry error and registry defragmenting options. With regard to the error checking, the user can select what error types s/he wants to be scanned (invalid paths, obsolete start menu items, invalid file associations, autorun registry keys, etc.).
If you go into Defragment Registry, the analysis will begin immediately and after that the user will be presented with which registry files need to be defragmented, registry sizes (original, after compression), saved bytes and compression ratio. All this requires a system restart.
In Registry Management you can perform a search of the registry or take registry snapshots and compare them. You can search the registry for a certain word or string of words (useful when seeing if an uninstalled software still has files in your registry).
Creating and comparing registry snapshots feature is useful when the user wants to see the changes made to the registry. I recommend taking a registry snapshot after you install all your basic softwares and then compare it to a snapshot taken after a while. After comparing the two registry states, the differences will be displayed in the tree view.
The Registry backup section is divided into three: creating a backup, restoring the registry from a full backup and restore from .reg backup files. Backing up your registry is very easy as it will use the MS Windows System Restore.
Restoring the registry from a full backup is not too hard as the software uses Windows System Restore utility again. Go in System Tools menu and backup your registry in there.
If you want to restore your registry from an already saved .reg file go to the .reg backup restoring option and select the file from there. Click Restore and that's it.
In the Advanced Settings menu the user can set to automatically run the software with Windows startup, schedule a registry scan, etc. If you want to exclude something from the registry search, set it in the Excluded Registry Strings and it'll be ignored (useful in skipping the registry keys that contain CD-ROM or removable drives).
The user can also exclude some registry keys from the analysis or even paths. Although the software deals with serious stuff, the developer has not forgotten to add a Colors section in the Advanced Settings. The options in here seem to me very useful as you can set colors for the Read-only value, invalid string, etc.
The Good
The software is practically a wizard that will help every sort of user freshen up his/her computer with the least effort.
The backing up the registry is a great feature because if the computer will ever move slower you can always restore it to a previous state.
The Bad
I could not perform a full defrag on my computer as the shareware version has some restrictions that prevent this.
The Truth
The software is rather expensive ($27.95) if you take into account that the backing up features it uses are actually part of your operating system utilities. I think this will be the last time to use it as I can also use CCleaner and the Windows utilities in order to keep my computer up and running.
I have got to admit that the speed it does its job with is amazing.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
