Speed up my PC ads?

Garbage.

MS has a free service that won't blow up your PC:

http://onecare.live.com/site/en-US/center/tuneup.htm

 

+1 what Korr said... I wouldn't trust any of those services.

Jedi

 

Yeah, but all that does is let you know if you should defrag your drive or not...

"The tune up scanner will look at your hard disk drive and tell you if it’s time to defragment it. Regularly defragmenting your hard disk can help optimize your computer’s performance and help it run faster."

Simply running Defrag or some other defragmenting utility will do the same thing in less time.

 

Durrr...no, it also has a basic registry scanner and malware scanner.

 

http://www.iobit.com/systemcare.html
Cnet review http://download.cnet.com/Advanced-SystemCare-Free/3000-2086_4-10407614.html?tag=mncol

I use this on my computer with great results. On one of my laptops I don't know what happened to it, but the damn thing slowed down to a crawl, but this program saved me from tossing it out and buying a new computer.

 

Sorry, but your link was directly to their "tuneup" scanner -which is defrag check only, though the "safety scanner" and "clean up" check for malware & clean the registry and can be accessed from that page. I'd also say the key word you mentioned above was "basic" and I would tend to recommend Piriform products (also free) before suggesting these from MS.

 

Reformat and reinstall the OS. Registry cleaner apps won't really clear out all the hardware enumeration entries.

 

If you're gutsy, just delete the enum key in the registry & let Windows create & repopulate it on reboot. Certainly NOT for the timid, but it can sure do the trick...

 

Piriform's stuff is no more or less effective than MS's own stuff...although CCLeaner (not their registry scanner that is included) is quite good and much better than what comes from Redmond. The rest of Piriform's wares can be forgotten.

 

Yes.

But, what a good reg cleaner app does is allow you to boot into a previously very screwed up install to get data off before Wipe and Reload.

Registry cleaners are only good for very very screwed up installs so you can save data before blowing up the OS and the partition it is on.