TweakNow RegCleaner Standard is a free registry cleaner that will scour your system’s registry for useless/unneeded registry entries and optionally remove these for you. These entries are often left behind after the removal of software, cluttering the registry and possibly hindering your system’s overall performance.
First off, let me start by saying that as far as reviewing registry cleaners goes, I only have anecdotal evidence and/or impressions that I gleamed after using the software on my machine.
In other words I do not have under my disposal any thorough testing of alternative registry cleaning software or a machine that is pre-loaded with carefully selected junk registry entries that I can then use to measure the performance of the software.
I did compare the registry cleaning results from this program to the results I obtained by using RegSupreme (one of the best shareware registry cleaners out there in my opinion). More on that below.
Having said that, I will say that as far as anecdotal evidence goes, TweakNow RegCleaner does very well indeed. It is very quick in scanning your registry, maintains a backup of each registry cleaning session that you can use to ’undo’ any intervention that it makes, and has a very professional looking (and confidence inspiring) interface. It also offers 2 modes of registry scanning (quick scan and deep scan) and will allow you to do a custom search where you specify and/or exclude sections of the registry that you want to include in the scan. You can, moreover, set up an exclusion list for any found entries that you might want the program to overlook in future registry scans.
The thing I like most about this software is that it will present the registry-cleaning results under 3 categories: entries that are safe to delete, entries that are NOT safe to delete, and “unknown” entries that the program cannot place in any one of these 2 categories. I have used this program on 3 computers and most of the results tend to be of the “safe to delete” variety (I’ve encountered a handful that were deemed ’unknown’, but so far none that are unsafe to delete). The program is designed such that it will force you to manually check any of the registry listings from “unsafe to delete” and “unknown” categories in order to delete them, minimizing your chances of deleting any entries that may be unsafe to delete without really intending to do so.
In my little RegSupreme comparison, TweakNow RegCleaner identified about a third of what RegSupreme found in terms of the number of results. However, in the unusual logic that pertains to the Windows registry, this may not mean that RegCleaner does a third of the job that RegSupreme does. A lot of it depends on which entries were identified, and the likelihood that any number of registry entries found are not unnecessary and might better be left alone. RegSupreme is probably the better product of the two, but if you are not an expert user TweakNow RegCleaner might just well be better suited to your needs.
Overall my impression of this software is that it is a very safe registry cleaner that is perfect for the casual user who wants to clean out his/her computer’s registry and does not want to have to worry about messing up their system. If you are in that category then this product will work very well for you.
Differences between the free and paid versions: Nothing significant, in my opinion. Paid “professional” version offers “Track Cleaning”, which (for a lack of a description) I assume is a cleaning function similar to what you get with CCleaner. It also includes a registry defragmentation (which you could also get from a number of freeware programs out there) and a so-called 1-click Windows Optimization function.
Version tested: 3.0.1
Compatibility: Windows 2000, XP, XP x64, 2003, Vista.
Go to the program home page to get the latest version (approx 1.01 megs).
