I'm not very familiar with registry stuff...

[dunbar]

... has anyone heard of needing to compress and defragment the registry?

Here is why I ask:
http://www.systweak.com/aro/regdefrag.asp

Sounds plausable to me, but I'm not a power user that tweaks his registry, so I have no experience with such ideas. Is this just smoke and mirrors?

[agathodaimon]

Well, I use a registry cleaner/fixer (can't remember for the life of me what the name is right now), and I have to say that it REALLY does keep my computer running smooth & fast. Especially considering all of the installing & uninstalling that I do.

[jmichna]

Originally posted by dunbar
... has anyone heard of needing to compress and defragment the registry?

Here is why I ask:
http://www.systweak.com/aro/regdefrag.asp

Sounds plausable to me, but I'm not a power user that tweaks his registry, so I have no experience with such ideas. Is this just smoke and mirrors?

I'm pretty sure that particular vendor's "BoostXP" product contains the registy clean/optimize stuff, plus (apparently) has a whole slew of other XP-tailored utilities. If you are going to go that route, maybe the multi-purpose way is more cost effective.

Having said that, I'll bet if you spent a little time doing a Google search you could find freeware progs that would do the same thing.

Personally, I use Tweak-XP from http://www.totalidea.de/frameset-tweakxp.htm

[agathodaimon]

ok, i found it.
It's NOT the best one out there, but it was FREE and it seems to do the job fairly well. Only problem is that it's not supported anymore.
BTW, I use Windows 2000 Pro

http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=458

For some reason, the site is really slow right now... Takes a while to load, so be patient.

[NDC]

I've tried those utils before. Personally, I saw no significant increase in boot up time using registry defraggers. Not worth defragging it in my opinion and risking the chance of partial registry corruption.

[shahani]

Epidemic may find this useful.