Why registry cleaners are essentially a scam

Last week I wrote about the malware infection that happened with Ccleaner. If you didn't read it than take a look here:  Ccleaner infected with malware 
​This made me realise a lot of people are still using software tools like Ccleaner thinking they are keeping their computer at a better shape thanks to this programs. Well, if you are one of them you should know that you are very wrong in thinking so.  Registry cleaners come in different flavours and with different features but essentially they all offer two things:
1- registry cleanup and optimisation 
2- Temporary files removal 

Now let us take a look at these two functions and their supposed usefulness 
Registry cleaning
The registry is where windows stores data that tells it how to act when certain things happen. Think of it as the law book of your operation system. The registry comprises of millions of instructions related to each and every file type on your computer. Now, it is perfectly normal for a law book with millions of instructions to have a few hundred or even a few thousand entries that are no longer needed. Having them does not have any influence whatsoever on the performance of your windows computer. Maybe in the early 90's some benefit could have been achieved from optimising the registry. There are two reasons for this; first off all there is the fact that the registry is a very robust system that was and still is optimised by Microsoft. The second is simply the advancement of hardware speeds. In short, Microsoft windows does a fine job at keeping your registry optimised without any help from third party applications. 
Temporary files removal
This feature is actually useful as programs, your operating system (windows 7, 8, 10 or MacOS etc) and system updates tend to leave residual files that are never used again but instead are just hogging space.  However, there is absolutely no reason to use a third part tool to remove those files. Both windows and MacOS have powerful and effective build-in hard drive clean-up tools. In fact, they are almost always better at cleaning up unused files than the third-party apps. 

So simply put, there is just no good reason to install registry cleaners and now that we saw malware infect the most popular of them all we now have a good reason to just avoid them all together. 

Stay safe online!
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