It's my nature to be skeptical. I don't jump on the band wagon with new fads, and I especially don't believe in quick fixes. For this reason when websites starting hyping all the benefits of registry cleaners I couldn't believe they were capable of improving computer performance.

The majority of sites I found during research only talked about the pros of registry repair software. Of all the sites not one explained why one was better then another or what potential down falls some registry programs might have had. If I wanted to learn about how these programs could improve performance I was going to have to test it myself. So that's what I did I created a comparison test for Registry Cleaners on my own test computer to decide if these programs really worked. My results? The programs were actually pretty surprising.

Speed was Irrelevant

I timed all of the registry cleaners I tested to see how long they took to do a complete scan. The time varied from under a minute to almost ten minutes. I did notice that a second scan with the same program was faster then the first, I can only presume they cached some of the data they found on the first scan.

The faster the full scan took meant nothing about the performance. Based on all the tests I ran the speed of a scan had no bearing on how well a registry cleaner actually performed.

Errors Found Doesn't Mean Errors Repaired

This really surprised me. The number of errors found during the full scan of my computer wasn't the same number of repairs, or better stated changes made to my registry. The top registry repair software completed 60-70% of the changes found in the full scan. I'd assume that to create more panic in users registry cleaners look to find as many potential errors as possible then only repair the key critical ones affecting performance.

Performance Came from Add-on Features

This was the test that really started to make me more of a believer in registry repair software. Up to this point there had been small improvements in the performance of my test PC from the scans and repairs down by each utility. Once I started running the file cleaners, start-up folder optimizers and other features of each program I began getting some great results.

My boot time of Windows was reduced, as well as the startup time for many of my programs. I was able to measure performance increase in time.

In the End

While my test PC wasn't that infected with junk files and registry errors I was able to squeeze out some performance. It wasn't really caused from the registry repair part of the software. The improvement came from running the additional programs that came with the software.

From my testing you can improve the performance of your computer using a registry cleaner. How ever ensure the one you buy has a guarantee, not everyone gets the same results so it's a good idea to be able to get a refund if you're not happy.