I had the very stupid idea of trying a registry cleaner yesterday. It’s a new product from Comodo, the makers of a lot of free security tools for your computer, and very crappy ones at that, as well as a provider of SSL certificates.
First of all, never use a Registry Cleaner. It’s stupid, won’t really give you any performance boost, and may crash your computer. But some are worse than others, for instance, Comodo. Their security cleaner claims to be “100% safe”. Well, it certainly isn’t. First off, it makes wild guesses at removing stuff from the registry and backs it up so you can revert. Once it’s done, it restarts your system and then asks you if everything is working OK. If not, you can revert. If yes, it DELETES THE BACKUP. WTF!? What is wrong with them. Oh right, as if your system was right just after rebooting. What if the system doesn’t even boot anymore already?
Well, how stupid I am for having clicked yes. In any cases, the computer ran fine, and not an ounce faster, even thought Comodo had supposedly deleted, and not fixed, thousands of bad registry entries (an important aspect of registry cleaners yes, the delete, they don’t fix… well, most of them), mostly from software I had uninstalled in the past. But this morning, my computer refused to log in and just hanged there.
Oh well, so long for registry cleaning on this retched old Windows XP machine at work.
Luckily, Safe Mode and System Restore exist. Just reboot and press F12 at BIOS and it should bring you in the window where you can choose to boot in safe mode. Once booted, go to Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Restore and voila! You can restore it to an earlier date when it still worked. You don’t lose work, just software you have installed/uninstalled and settings you may have changed (can’t say specifically, it varies a lot but usually it’s just enough to fix things).
Although I haven’t seen any system more unstable than Windows, I haven’t seen any system more fixable than Windows since XP got out. Things have changed though, and I’d be ready to say Windows 7 is as stable, if not more, than some of the UNIX systems I use. NT 6.1 is awesome.
