I've read so much about registry cleaners but still clueless if its good or bad on my PC. What

I've read a number of articles from PC World to Computer Hope extolling the necessity of using registry cleaners which carry the names as 'Registry Cleaners', EasyCleaners', 'RegistryOrganizers', 'RegCure', among other names. However, when I came across a book (McGraw Hill Osborne) entitled ''The Healthy PC'' by Carey Holzman, a PC Repair Specialist of 15 years, it stated (Chapter 12, p.195) that these are softwares to avoid. The reason is simply that based on his years of experiance, they create more problems than it solve. He compared it to putting a band aid to a gapping wound.

I've read so much about registry cleaners but still clueless if its good or bad on my PC. What is it actually?anti virus software

Well I guess a band aid is better than nothing. Holzman probably cleans the registry by hand, but for the average joe that's impossible. The registry is Microsoft's way of making us all go insane. Once they had a perfect system called ''ini'' files so they changed it. In the old days, you just deleted a folder and the whole program disappeared, leaving no trace on your hard disk. Today, program files are spread everywhere and parts of the program that were once stored in the ini files are now stuck in a database called the registry. The registry contains all sorts of stuff including the way you have set a program up to suit you (colours etc), anti-piracy aids and the list goes on. When you uninstall a program in particular, a lot of junk is left in the registry. Software developers are quick to put stuff in there during an install, but reluctant to remove it if their program is deleted. Good registry cleaners do two major things. Firstly, they look for registry entries that are no longer associated with anything and delete them. This however leaves a gap in the database where something used to be. Think of a conveyor carrying loafs of bread. If you take a loaf away, there's a gap. The second thing the cleaner should do is compress the registry or push all that bread together. This of course, reduces the file size and makes it easier for windows to read it, and it reads it often.