Product Reviews

The Registry is where Windows and many applications store their configuration options. Having a single place to store such information makes application development easier, but it can also lead to problems. As you install and remove programs on your computer, the Registry entries can become corrupted or filled with invalid entries. PC Tools' Registry Mechanic aims to help.

The friendly user interface is reminiscent of anti-spyware tools. Just click the Scan button to get started. The program looks for invalid short cuts and shared DLLs and checks the Registry's integrity. The first scan took around

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five minutes on our test PC and discovered 93 invalid entries in our Registry, all of which we chose to delete.

Playing with the Registry can cause problems, but Registry Mechanic makes a backup before it attempts any repairs. You can easily restore a previous version using the Restore option. Registry Mechanic can also compress and reorganise your Registry so that it takes up less space and works more efficiently. Selecting this option also creates a Windows System Restore Point, so you can undo changes later.

However, this is separate from the backups Registry Mechanic makes, and to use Restore Points you have to open the Windows utility. We would have preferred Registry Mechanic to manage all backups and restores internally.

The price of the software includes a year's worth of free updates. A Live Update button checks for these updates, but we couldn't find any way of scheduling this automatically.

If you have a new, relatively clean PC, Registry Mechanic won't make any difference to its performance. If you've added and removed a lot of applications over the years, though, Registry Mechanic will prove a useful ally against the problem of an unstable PC.