Registry Repair Utilities

There are many registry repair utilities available today. Some of them are built-in Windows programs. These built-in programs are:

Registry checker a.k.a. Scanreg
System File Checker or SFC

The built-in registry checker tool is available up until Windows 98. It was run very much in the same way a registry cleaner is run these days. Scanreg was run from the run box. In other words, you would click start- run and type scanreg.exe into the run box.

There were many drawbacks to this free internal program. One of these drawbacks is the fact scanreg would make a backup of the registry upon a successful computer boot up. The scanreg program would attempt to replace bad registry files is found with good ones from the backup program it made from a previous successful boot up. Sometimes, for one reason or another, this good registry backup would not be available. Therefore, registry checker would try to fix the registry but usually it would not have the good files to repair it.

Another drawback was scanreg was it potentially would replace updated files with older ones. In other words, after a Windows update, Windows would have all its newest files in the registry. However, after running registry checker, files that were older than the updated files would replace the updated files. This would make the registry act as if it had registry corruption. In other words it would slow down the computer.

As of Windows XP, the built-in registry repair program changed to System File Checker, or SFC. SFC is run at a command line. The command that is written at the prompt is SFC/scannow. The drawback here is the fact it does have to be run from a command line and many people are not comfortable operating from this venue. On top of that, SFC will find problems, if there are any, in the registry but it will be up to the user to find good files from a registry backup to replace the bad ones System File Checker found.

In other words SFC is for the geeks. Even for many of us geeks, the registry cleaner of choice is simply a commercial registry cleaner. With a user-friendly graphical user interface all we have to do is click a button with our mouse and the registry cleaner will take care of the rest. It will find registry corruption and repair it all in one shot. In my opinion you can’t go wrong repairing your registry in this way. It is easy and it’s quick!