Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Freeware, Troubleshooting
Quicksys RegDefrag: Defrag your Windows registry
by Simon Kerbel May 13th 2008
Who doesn't love defragmenting? Here at Download Squad, we defragment everything we can get our hands on: hard drives, registries, jigsaw puzzles. Our daily defragment fix can be found here, with Quicksys RegDefrag. In case you didn't piece it together from the name, RegDefrag will defragment your registry. In layman's terms: the program works to optimize your registry by removing gaps, fragments and wasted space in Windows registry files.
RegDefrag begins by analyzing your system's registry. If your registry is sufficiently fragmented, RegDefrag will give you the option to defragment. Unfortunately, there are no backup options (unless RegDefrag performs them behind the scenes, but we wouldn't count on it), which means you're out of luck should RegDefrag decide to remove or defragment the wrong files.
In our tests, RegDefrag recovered over 3 MB of space, which was about 10% of our computer's registry. Not too shabby.
RegDefrag is free, and compatible with Windows Vista, XP, and the ghosts of Windows past.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
harmx said 5:06PM on 5-13-2008
Iv'e been using ERUNT combined with NTREGOPT for years now and highly recommend them both!
Reply
jfjb said 8:13PM on 5-13-2008
I'm with you, dud.
Basics, always basics.
I didn't say (in caps) basic...
RP said 12:34AM on 5-14-2008
OK, I ran NTREGOPT, and it saved me 3%.
I have to say, it was a bit unnerving. While running, my machine froze for over 60 seconds! I was about to hit the reset button, but then suddenly it un-froze and continued. Good thing I was patient. Kind of a scary app -- no warnings, no pause/cancel button, just hope it finishes.
Fred Thompson said 1:05AM on 5-14-2008
I love ERUNT and have it set to do a backup every 6 hours, keeping the previous 31 days. It's saved my butt a few times.
PageDefrag is also a real nice thing to have in your startup arsenal.
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James said 10:21AM on 5-14-2008
Does ERUNT do anything that System Restore doesn't? Also, does it have any kind of performance impact whilst running? I mean, "implement good backup" has been on my todo list basically forever, and I need a good, free suggestion for both system and data. I need to get off my ass and do it, I guess.
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RP said 1:46PM on 5-14-2008
I guess with ERUNT, you can schedule it to run more often than system restore.
One surprise I had with XP System Restore -- when ANY drive fills up, system restore turns off! It may also delete old restore points when this happens -- not sure.
I looked one day, and I had 0 restore points. One rarely-used drive had < 30 MB free -- not even my C: drive. Annoying. Let's hope XP SP3 fixes this.
jfjb said 6:03PM on 5-15-2008
My take has been to reserve one partition -- if not a drive -- for each category: OS, swap file, applications, data... as in C:\, D:\, E:\ and F:\ partition or drive -- drive is always better than partition.
I set up ERUNDT to back up my registry files on F:\.
All I have to do is backup daily my data also on F:\.
I use SyncBack (free, flexible, does also synchronization) to do the job on an external drive. Another physical internal drive would work as well; different drive, remember.
The OS can be re-installed 'virgin' easily on its own C:\.
The swap file can be deleted any time on its own D:\.
The apps are OK on their original disks or web connections (passwords, serial numbers encrypted on F:\, right?). So, I back up the E:\ partition/drive once in a while, no sweat.
What else?
Oh yes, I keep the beer in the garage fridge.
Cheers.