[RESOLVED] UniBlue Registry Booster on your home page...

[WickedGirl]

Hello! I am not a big fan of registry cleaners/boosters, but my husband downloaded and installed the UniBlue Registry Booster from the linkon your home page to his computer (which I am tasked with maintaining). Who the heck is UniBlue, and are they a reputable software distributor like Piriform for instance?

[Tom T.]

Hello! I am not a big fan of registry cleaners/boosters, but my husband downloaded and installed the UniBlue Registry Booster from the linkon your home page to his computer (which I am tasked with maintaining). Who the heck is UniBlue, and are they a reputable software distributor like Piriform for instance?

The reviews at mywot.com are very mixed, with some reporting very good results, some reporting that it does nothing worthwhile (one compared it unfavorably to Piriform), and some reporting outright scams.

It is difficult to know the reliability of any online reviews, since the company (or hotel or whatever) can have people post good reviews, whereas competitors can have bad ones posted. Investigate thoroughly, via multiple sources.

This issue has been discussed with Giorgio before. He said that he downloaded and ran the product in a virtual machine (VM), and that at the very least, it seemed to do no harm. Also, that in the few cases that he had verified of those with complaints, the company had issued swift refunds without argument.
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The following is entirely my own "personal" opinion:

Is it broken? Does it need fixing?

There is much to be gained by cleaning accumulated cruft from a hard drive, in both space and privacy, such as CCleaner does.
This can speed up backups, defragmentation, and, if the drive is cluttered enough, performance.

Registry issues are not so common as people think, and if serious, generally produce noticeable symptoms.
An obsolete registry entry from an uninstalled program does nothing but sit there and take up 100 bytes or so.

Most uninstallers, in my experience, never remove *everything* from the hard drive. I'll find miscellaneous folders, sometimes empty; sometimes, files, and often, Reg entries. That is poor performance by the uninstaller, but I just delete the visible stuff. It may or may not be worth searching the registry for such things, unless there is a problem.

I used a free registry defrag tool once, after some major trimming of the registry by hand -- some reg entries are shared, and many cleaners, including CCleaner, may remove ones that may be needed elsewhere. I still vetted every suggested removal. Then defragged the registry afterwards. Total savings: Cut the registry from high 30's MB to 17.5 MB. (the \system32 portion on XP, not including "C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\ntuser.dat")

After that initial cleaning, checking with QRegDefrag a few times a year generally shows about a MB or so to be gained, but in actuality, only about 6-700 K are cut, and a couple hundred K return. Hardly worth it.

The initial 20+ MB isn't really a big deal either, but as someone who likes to keep things as lean as possible (entire HD usage is just over 900 MB), it does shrink full-disk backups a bit. Most probably wouldn't notice the difference.

Is it broken? Does it need fixing?

Side note: I was going to do the same experiment myself, but when trying to download, was told that I needed to install the .NET Runtime, which I don't have, and don't care to have. Nothing else seems to require it; it's very bulky -- hundreds of MB -- and an ongoing source of security risks, even this recent April Patch Tuesday update:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/secu ... n/ms12-025

All IMHO. YMMV.

[WickedGirl]

Thank you very kindly for the detailed response! The information and opinions you provided were very helpful!

[Tom T.]

Thank you very kindly for the detailed response! The information and opinions you provided were very helpful!

You're quite welcome! .., keeping in mind that those were *one user's personal opinions*; others will have different opinions.

Side note, re: .NET: The May MS Patch Tuesday updates listed two more bulletins involving .NET, with a total of four vulnerabilities, three of them Critical = Remote Code Execution, and one DOS.

(Also, as this writer has observed on several occasions, if more users would donate even a few dollars, euros, or pounds to NS, the ads probably wouldn't be necessary. Just a thought. )

Thanks again for the kind words. Will mark as Resolved, so to speak.

[WickedGirl]

Absolutely agree about the donations! I have done so more than once. I hate .Net too BTW!

[Tom T.]

Absolutely agree about the donations! I have done so more than once. I hate .Net too BTW!

On behalf of Giorgio, thank you for your donations to enable the continued development and enhancement of NoScript.

(The Support Team are all unpaid volunteers, and as you can imagine, NoScript has become full-time, or more, for Giorgio, who is therefore pretty much dependent on it.)

You may find interesting this 2005 post about .NET, from SysInternals (now an MS subsidiary) guru Mark Russinovich:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/markrussinov ... cared.aspx

It's mostly about memory and CPU usage, and the footprint bloat has only gotten worse over the years.
There is no mention of security in that post, but larger footprint = greater attack surface = more vulns.

Cheers.