Uniblue RegistryBooster

I’ve started a new video series called “Don’t Buy This!” where I will feature different technology related products I think you shouldn’t buy or use.  This is the first video in the series.  In today’s show, we  examined Uniblue’s RegistryBooster 2010.

What is RegistryBooster?  RegistryBooster is what is known as a registry cleaner.  Registry cleaners supposedly will look for orphaned, missing, or otherwise potentially problematic entries within the Windows registry.  The software companies often claim that removing these entries will speed up startup and/or shutdown times, among other things.  Sounds good on paper, right?  Right.  However, as we all know, what’s on paper isn’t always the way it works out in reality.

Many people praise registry cleaners as a gift from God and are delighted to see when their registry cleaner application finds stuff to remove.  The thing is most people don’t run these applications right after they do a clean install Windows, they are typically downloaded and installed later on after what many people refer to “bit-rot” occurs.  So it would seem normal for this application to find stuff to remove.  Well, I took it upon myself to run Uniblue’s RegistryBooster right after I did a clean install, which should be perfect, especially if nothing has even installed or uninstalled on that particular install before.

Now, I bet you can guess what happened?  It found stuff to remove.  That shouldn’t be the case.  If this software was legitimate it shouldn’t have found anything.  Everything it found was directly related to Microsoft, which again, doesn’t make any sense.  Why would it find issues with a clean install?  There were no errors presented to me upon first boot and nothing is missing in the install.

I tested this software before installing the other registry cleaners as well – it still found the same exact stuff to remove.  I’ll be doing further tests with Uniblue’s RegistryBooster as well as the others by removing what it finds, rescanning, etc. to see if I notice any speed increases or if any issues arise due to the removal of certain entries.