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Defrag the Registry with Regdefrag

The Windows Registry is not defragmented if you defragment your hard drive. This can be quite a problem for users who regularly install and uninstall applications on their system because uninstallers tend to “forget” to remove entries in the Registry during the uninstallation process. It’s astonishing that even the Registry of my brand new system which has been setup only a week ago was highly fragmented.

Defragmenting the Registry with Regdefrag (via Genbeta) would reduce the size from 28904 Kilobyte to 27160 Kilobyte, a reduction of more than 6%. A smaller Registry tends to increase performance on the system and even decrease the time it takes to boot a system. I remember that the Registry on my old computer had a size of 55 Megabytes, that’s twice the size of the current Registry.

The process or defragmentation works exactly the same way as the defragmentation of a hard drive by removing gaps, fragments and wasted space in Windows Registry files.

defrag registry

Analysis and Defragmentation did only take a matter of seconds on my computer, it probably will take longer on slower computers with a larger Registry.

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About the Author:Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News Back in 2005. He is passionate about all things tech and knows the Internet and computers like the back of his hand. You can follow Martin on Facebook or Twitter.

Author: , Tuesday May 13, 2008 -
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Responses so far:

  1. You really should read what defragmentation is. To defrag a hard drive means to put the bits of a specific file together on the physical medium. The Regdefrag authors simply call their process ‘to defrag’, but it is not the same process. Regdefrag removes unnecessary entries, it does not rearrange the entries that are there. They are taking a technical term and turning it into a marketing term. That’s disgusting.

  2. Jojo says:

    The only 2 REAL registry “defragment” programs I know of are:

    Pagedefrag – http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897426.aspx

    and

    NTRegOpt (actually compact only function) – http://www.larshederer.homepage.t-online.de/erunt/

  3. Votre says:

    Re: comment from “What is NTFS?”

    OK. Fine. What should they call it? It’s still a useful utility. And considering Quicksys offers it for free, why should whatever they call it be considered “disgusting.”

  4. RegSeeker says:

    hm … what is freeware “marketing” ?

    I think the Term ist right: compacting and defragmenting.

  5. Fulalas says:

    Re: comment from “What is NTFS?”

    This software doesn’t remove invalid registry entries. It does an internal registry desfragmentation, reallocating the empty spaces from previously removed entries in order to leave it contiguous, so wasting less space and making it faster. So, yes, it really does what it tells. You can read more in the FAQ session in the RegDefrag website. ;-)

  6. rruben says:

    Didn’t knew that such a tool exists. Great though, I let it immidiatly run on my pc.

    Thanks again!

  7. yash says:

    typo..1st para,last word : i think you mean to say fragmented, not defragmented

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