Windows' Registry is a central place in which applications store their settings. Over time, the Registry can become corrupted, which can lead to serious system faults and slow performance. Registry Repair aims to fix these problems.
You can run Registry Repair manually from the control panel or schedule it to run daily, weekly, monthly or when your PC boots. You can also choose a full Registry scan or select particular areas to check for errors. Unless you have a good idea of how the Registry works, though, we'd recommend the full scan.
Scanning is very quick, and Registry Repair presents you with a list of errors it finds. These are classified into four different groups: Classes, File Lists, Stashes and Links. Unfortunately, there's no explanation anywhere as to what these groups mean. The list of problem entries doesn't shed any more light on the problem, either, and simply contains a copy of the offending Registry key.
PC Tools' Registry Mechanic does a much better job. It categorises problems into meaningful groups, and each problem has an associated level (high, medium or low), so you can see how serious it is. Clicking on any individual problem takes you to a detailed explanation page. Registry Repair's lack of information makes it hard to work out whether you should repair a particular problem or not. Fortunately, there's an option to back up the Registry, so if problems occur after cleaning, you can restore your PC to its working state.
After performing a full scan on our test PC and cleaning all the errors it found, we ran Registry Mechanic, which found around 30 minor problems Registry Repair had missed.
The software is very cheap and does a basic job of repairing your PC's Registry, but System Mechanic ($30, around £18, www.pctools.com) is more thorough and a lot easier to understand, too.
Requires Windows 98 SE or above, 300MHz processor, 40MB disk spaceAuthor: David Ludlow
Registry Repair