Is it necessary to clean the win7 registry?
Chunlei
The registry is the configuration center of the win system, and the configuration information of most programs is written here.
With the increase of applications, there are more and more configuration information for various applications, and when the application is uninstalled, the related registry information is often not automatically cleaned up.
When an application reads the registry, it must retrieve and read its own related information. The larger the registry and the more redundant information, the slower the relative retrieval speed.
For ordinary users, this "slowness" can be ignored; for high-end users, this "slowness" has a cost-benefit ratio issue.
So, clearing the registry is beneficial, but not necessary.
By the way: Linux system programs use the organization method of configuration files, which is superior to the registry.
Published on 2012-10-11
Zhihu user
1 person agreed with this answer
If you often mess with the computer , it is necessary.
However, you cannot use cleaning software indiscriminately, let alone use several softwares in turn. If a problem occurs in the end, the gain will outweigh the loss. My usual usage habits are mentioned here [1], I hope it can help you.
——Zhihu
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Is it necessary to clear the computer cache? Will not clearing the cache really cause the computer to respond slower? If you want to clear the cache, how often is the best time?
Talk about the so-called "system garbage" in Win7 and its "real body"
1) What is system garbage
The term "system garbage" , the origin is unknown, but in the early days it was generally impossible to escape the promotion of various optimization software.
It is called Disk Cleanup in Windows. It is more appropriate to directly translate it as "disk deduplication" or "disk cleanup". There is almost no relevant software abroad that involves rubbish words. However, based on the greatness of language, , you can imagine how things will change if the word "junk" is added. Starting from Windows 98, the most famous softwares are Super Rabbit and Windows Optimization Master, which have almost unified the world of optimization software. Everyone has either an Optimization Master or a Super Rabbit on their computer. These two artifacts can be said to be indispensable tools for home and travel. Subsequently, almost all computer users across the country have invested in the vast work of cleaning up system garbage, which has lasted for more than ten years and they have not been able to return. When many people are bored every day, their favorite thing to do is to open "My Computer", alt enter C drive, "research" how many MB the C drive has grown today, and then use various optimization tutorials to reduce these few MBs. Kill MB to eliminate "system garbage" in the bud, and then you can sleep peacefully and feel proud that your computer skills have improved a lot. Due to the inevitability of "system garbage", many users are extremely crisis-conscious and care more about the C drive than whether the cat at home has been fed today.
Optimization software has long occupied the top spot on the download list through similar concept promotions. Although these two giants in the computer industry are gradually fading out of the market, the successor 360 students can be said to have had a It went beyond that, studying all kinds of "garbage elimination" to the extreme, and deleted all kinds of files.
One month into the European World Cup, many media have hyped how many thousands of hours were wasted. Computer users throughout China have been struggling for so many years. How many lives have to be wasted? I am a conspiracy theorist, although the person who invented this concept may not have realized the impact it would have on the entire computer industry. It is similar to losing a horseshoe nail and leading to the defeat of Waterloo. But I think since you have done all the bad things and enjoyed all the glory, you can't even think about dying with peace of mind. I won’t talk about the various system problems caused by using “optimization” software back then, but I will focus on the garbage cleaning function.
Who doesn’t want to get rid of “garbage” quickly? The person who thought of promoting this concept at that time was very thorough in psychological research, and this word can be said to have greatly disturbed the ** of computer users. Slogans such as "Your system is full of junk, use Windows Optimizer to improve system speed" are everywhere. However, what kind of files are considered “unnecessary files for the system”? Are the files that various optimization software strives to eliminate considered “unnecessary files for the system”? This is the crux of the matter.
As a computer user, I pay more attention to three indicators of the operating system. I think one or several of them are also what most people are concerned about: 1. Is it fast, such as boot speed? Program execution speed; 2. Is it stable? Overflow or error reporting every now and then is not what we want; 3. Is the capacity of the system disk too large? If the C drive is always on the verge of being full, many tasks will not be possible. The current cleaning software is designed to promote items 1 and 3, because these are visible and tangible to users, especially 3. You can instantly see how many MB of extra free space is available on the C drive, but if not used properly, It will cause a complete collapse of 1 and 2.
So, what exactly is the so-called "garbage"? I think it can be divided into several categories, see the next chapter for breakdown.
2) What is system garbage?
1. Cache class
Cache can be said to be an indispensable part of today's computer system. Not only the hardware has cache, but the OS also has cache.
1.1 Windows system cache: System cache is a very general concept. It includes many paths to ensure the normal use of the operating system and some applications. The most common one is TEMP, and most of them are The operation of system components depends on this directory. In addition, the folders where pre-reading mechanisms such as prefetch are located can also be classified into this category.
1.2 Application data cache: The application directory is mainly the TEMP directory. In the core of NT6 and above, it corresponds to the \AppData\Local\Temp folder in the user folder. This is where the cache of some applications is mainly stored. For example: the Cache of Aoyou, PotPlayer and other programs are all here. 1.3 IE cache: The reason why IE is taken out separately is because it is special. Some caches corresponding to IE have their own independent locations. For example, temporary web page files are in the Temporary Internet Files folder, history is in the Recent folder, and cookies, etc. There are also special folders
2. Registry class The registry is the core part of the Windows management mechanism. As the system usage time increases, the redundancy of the registry is inevitable. In addition, some programs developed by irresponsible programmers write key values ??during installation that cannot be uninstalled cleanly, which also increases data redundancy. Therefore, the main principle of cleaning the registry is to delete redundant key-value pairs.
3. System legacy file class Maybe it’s not scientific to name it this way, but let’s call it that. The characteristic of this type of files (folders) is that they take up a lot of space. Take the system I installed half a month ago as an example: the \Windows\Installer folder has reached 6G, and the \Windows\winsxs folder has reached nearly 7G. The two folders add up to nearly 14G, which shows how much space they take up. This type of file is something that current software does not dare to cross, because improper cleaning in any place may cause system crashes or abnormalities. In the same way, the anti-installation files for Windows updates also exist on the C drive. Cleaning them can save considerable space, but it will also bring potential harm (for example, some restore points cannot be rolled back).
4. Others The rest that I haven’t mentioned or I haven’t thought of can be classified as “others” for the time being. ActiveX, system restore, etc. are all targets of current junk cleaning software.
Okay, I have said so much in this chapter, and in the end I just want to say one thing for those documents that have been labeled as "garbage": "I am not garbage."
3) The true form of "system garbage"
We choose some important "garbage" to explain.
The first item is ActiveX and Java applets that are automatically downloaded from specific web pages when surfing the Internet. The size is 0 byte. Please skip this item.
The second item is the most familiar Temporary Internet Files, IE cache. The default setting of IE is 50MB. If it exceeds 50MB, expired data will be automatically cleared. Are you stuck with this 50MB? I set it to 400M. Please look at the underlined part, "for quick viewing" - "for quick access". The development of the computer industry is largely due to the invention of the cache cache register. Whether it is various hardware, Almost all caches exist, such as the cache of the hard disk, the first, second and third level cache of the CPU, bios, memory, etc. The introduction of the concept of cache into the operating system is a qualitative leap. There are actually people who are staring at this disk capacity and persisting. The battle lasted for more than 10 years. It's just because temporary occupies the title of "system garbage". Is this really the case?
The third item is game statistics. If I delete my record of completing advanced minesweeper in 160 seconds, it will be gone. You don’t want this little space, do you?
The fourth item is the recycle bin. There is nothing to say about it. You can find a lot of useful things if you keep it and browse through it occasionally.
The fifth item is the key, occupying the largest area. Various temp folders are generated by applications. The relevant information is usually deleted before the program is closed. If it is not deleted automatically, it means that the program considers these things to be temporarily useful. , it can be safely deleted if it has not changed significantly for several weeks.
The sixth item is the cache files of photos, videos, and documents. If you can understand the true meaning of cache, you will not covet these mere tens of MB.
The seventh item, the error report solution file, is used when your computer has an error. WINDOWS will automatically search for solutions. Novices can use these recommended methods to solve computer problems.
4) Summary
There are many reasons why the available space of the C drive is reduced. In fact, even if you put all the software on the D drive, the C drive will not be clean and the software will be in the C drive. Create some files needed for your own operation in the appdata or other folders of the disk. These files are required for the running of the program. The design idea of ??the current software is very clear. Even if you install the program to the G drive, the part that should stay on the C drive will still be automatically created on the C drive. Moreover, this kind of deletion is harmful and unhelpful. of. For example, QQ chat records are saved in My Documents by default. Even if you ghost once a week, it means that after ghosting the system, you will lose at least several days of chat records. In addition, there are firefox configuration files and various configurations. , such as my appdata/Roaming/sogouExplorer, the size is close to 700M, and the cache of the webkit core is also placed here. Chrome is even better. It directly installs all programs into appdata. Many people find it uncomfortable, but are those technicians at Google fools? Please see the appdata\roaming list. Have you seen a lot of familiar software?
I think appdata is the soul of the entire operating system based on the "personal part"! The system settings made by your current account, including themes, mouse speed, input methods, etc., and software configurations are basically saved in this place. It can be said that the reason why your computer is yours is different from other people's computers, not yours. How big is the hard drive capacity and how high is the CPU frequency? Instead, it condenses your personal efforts at the data level and ultimately forms your own computer style.
The roaming folder is the soul of the software. The day it is installed in the computer, any software can only be regarded as a whiteboard program. However, as we slowly use it, we will find that this software becomes more and more complex. It becomes more and more convenient, maybe you change the theme of the software, maybe you change the layout, maybe you change the corresponding shortcut keys, etc., especially for some highly customizable software. The longer you use these software, the more your personal style will become. The difference between the software you use and the whiteboard software is reflected in the data level, which is the various configuration files saved under roaming. Have you ever thought about going from a whiteboard computer to finally forming this highly personal style? How long does the configuration process take? Everyone's computer is in a constant process of change, and this style is also constantly changing, but it is always different from a whiteboard program. (You feel comfortable using your own Photoshop, but you feel uncomfortable using someone else’s. Have you ever thought about the reason?)
This is also the meaning of backup. Not just backing up personal data, but backing up that complete style.
This article borrows part of the article content, which has been modified with the consent of the original author.
The next article will talk about whether it is a single partition drive or multiple partition drives, and Win7’s excellent backup and restore mechanism