{rw_text}Giveaway of the day for March 27, 2009:

Wise Registry Cleaner 4 Pro

Version reviewed:

v4.22 Build 180

Software description as per GOTD:

Wise Registry Cleaner is a powerful registry cleaner and registry optimizer, it speeds up your PC by cleaning your Windows Registry. It removes the junk that accumulates in your Windows Registry. You can safely and easily clean your Windows registry.And it will help you improve your PC’s performance by optimize your Windows Registry.

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• Fairly aesthetically please interface (with the ability to change if you dislike the default one).
• You can manually backup and restore your registry.
• An “Undo” is automatically created before your make any registry changes (by default).
• Has the ability to optimize your registry PC(w/ a “Wizard” to “guide” you).
• Informs you of which registry fixes are “safe” and which are “unsafe”.
• Has an “exclusion” list you can use to protect certain registry entries.
• Supports for many (many) languages.
• You can export your list of registry errors into an Excel file.

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• Once you click on a “Category” after your scan has finished, you can’t go back to showing all the registry errors.
• “Optimization Wizard” wants to optimize my laptop as if it only had 2GB of RAM instead of the full 3GB >.>’.
• Has “Download Wise Disk Cleaner” option checked by default during installation – careful or you may accidently download it.

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{rw_score}
{for=”Features as Described” value=”10″}Everything is there.
{/for}
{for=”Ease of Use” value=”8″}Point and click; however a little technical knowledge is recommended so that you know what change you are making to your computer (but not really needed).
{/for}
{for=”Performance” value=”7″}Finds a fair (and “believable”) amount of registry errors; however CPU usage fluctuates between 0-11% and RAM usage is higher then I like at ~22MB (this is all with WRC4 sitting idle after a scan and with the default theme).
{/for}
{for=”Usefulness” value=”10″}Everyone who has a computer can clean their registry.
{/for}
{for=”Arbitrary Equalizer” value=”9″}This category reflects an arbitrary number that does not specifically stand for anything. Rather this number is used to reflect my overall rating/verdict of the program in which I considered all the features and free alternatives.
{/for}
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{rw_verdict}[tup]
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Registration and installation went fine. Note that at the last screen of Wise Registry Cleaner installer, there is an option “Download Wise Disk Cleaner”. It is checked by default; be sure to uncheck it before you finish your installation.

On GOTD comments I posted

If people may recall, Wise Disk Cleaner contained false positives. I sincerely hope Wise Registry Cleaner does not, but being by the same company, it very well could.

Well after testing and fully reviewing this software (did you think I was not going to? =P), I can say I like Wise Registry Cleaner. The errors it finds are what I call “believe” and compare well to my other “trusted registry cleaners”. In other words, Wise Registry Cleaner was a (pleasant) surprise “thumbs up”.

This is what Wise Registry Cleaner’s main program window looks like:

The interface is pretty nice looking if I do say so myself. If you don’t like it, go to “Options” -> “Style” to choose a different style. At the same time, it is fairly straightforward (although I wish some of the icons were a little bit more self explanatory it is nothing you can’t get used to after using the program once or twice).

Wise Registry Cleaner has most/all of the features one expects in a registry cleaner:

• You can backup/restore the registry manually.
• You can set the program to automatically create “backups” before you make any registry changes.
• You can pick and choose what registry errors to scan for and/or pick (or you can just do the whole registry).
• There is a scheduler which you can use to schedule cleanups.
• There is an “Exclusion List” where you can enter “keywords” that will help prevent certain registry values from being detected as “errors”.

In addition to those “traditional” features, Wise Registry Cleaner also has an “Optimizer” which helps tweak some settings on your computer. The “Optimizer” comes with an “Optimizer Wizard” which you can use to allow Wise Registry Cleaner to automatically optimize your computer; of the testing I did with the “Optimizer” I found that Wise Registry Cleaner wants to optimize my laptop as if it had 2GB of RAM instead of 3GB. It may be thinking of dual channel usage but that is not possible since I have 3GB of RAM. Other then that, my testing was limited to seeing if the start menu “speed” was actually increased or decreased like the optimizer says and I can say I did notice a slight difference.

Anyway back to the main feature of Wise Registry Cleaner; only one thing to note before I start discussing the actual testing. Wise Registry Cleaner classifies all the registry errors it finds as either “safe to fix” or “unsafe to fix”. The safe ones will be automatically checked after a scan is run while the unsafe ones will not be checked (you must manually check them to fix them).

Okay so when it comes to registry cleaners, it does not matter how fancy a program may be. If it sucks as a registry cleaner the program is useless. Also, just because one registry cleaner gives more/less errors than another registry cleaner does not mean that one or the other one are wrong. It just means they are different. It happens all the time. that being said, Wise Registry Cleaner seems to do a pretty good job with registry cleaning. The results were, as I stated above, comparable to my trusted registry cleaners:

I ran the registry cleaners of all the following programs one after another. The number next to the program name is the amount of errors that were detected.

CCleaner – 6

TuneUp Utilities 2007 – 27

Advanced SystemCare Pro (not Free) – 231

WinUtilities- 246

Wise Registry Cleaner – 245

Now I have found that CCleaner usually always turns out to be the “least adventurous” registry cleaner out of all the ones I test so the fact that it only found 6 registry errors was not a surprise. What was a surprise is the fact that TuneUp Utilities 2007 only found 27; however as I already said, differences happen and as long as you are using programs that you know you can trust, you are good.

Furthermore, Advanced SystemCare Pro, WinUtilities and Wise Registry Cleaner all found similar amounts of errors. That is a good sign. However to see if this was a coincidence or not, I compared the results of Wise Registry Cleaner and WinUtilities (WinUtilities being the “benchmark”). While the results were not 100% the same, many of the registry errors were similar across WRC and WinUtilities. The ones that were not similar I did my own “manual testing” and discovered that WRC was pretty accurate. All things considered, Wise Registry Cleaner really impressed me up to this point so I fixed all the errors found by Wise Registry Cleaner. Did my computer crash burn and die? Nope; in fact after a quick look, I don’t see shortcuts deleted or anything important missing. Now does this mean I won’t have problems in the future that are related to this registry cleanup I just did with Wise Registry Cleaner? No – you can never be 100% sure that you won’t have problems in the future. However, overall a job well done by Wise Registry Cleaner: thumbs up.

This review was conducted on a laptop running Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit. The specs of the laptop are as follows: 3GB of RAM, a Radeon HD 2600 512MB graphics card, and an Intel T8300 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo processor.

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{rw_verdict2}Initially I figured Wise Registry Cleaner 4 Pro would be just another registry cleaner that I could throw away. However WRC proved to be as good as the developer claims: thumbs up. If you want to download and use WRC there are no regrets: go for it. However I am not recommendin WRC mainly because there are so many system utility software out there that can do registry cleaning; why download a program for specific registry cleaning when the other software can do just as a good job + give you more features. Therefore my recommendation is to pick from any of system tune up utilities mentioned above. You are welcome to do what I do: I use Advanced SystemCare Pro for the regular maintenance of my computer (I plan on keeping it for as long as the free license lasts) and then run WinUtilities and TuneUp Utilities 2007 from time to time to supplement my maintenance.
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