Although we liked the
previous versions of Registry Booster, the user interface was occasionally less than intuitively usable. So the new user interface is a welcome improvement. It's both easy to understand and informative, mainly because of the clearly written explanatory text which appears in each mode and accompanying each operation.
Compatibility with 64-bit operating systems, as well as the still more common 32-bit operating system versions, is also a welcome change. Uniblue really didn't have much choice in the matter—64-bit version of Windows Vista and Windows 7 are becoming ubiquitous—because without 64-bit compatibility the utility is much less appealing in the marketplace. The implementation is smooth as silk; the software installs, scans and runs flawlessly.
The graphical Damage Level indicator new in this version provide a visual assessment in the form of a pointer on a scale (low-medium-high). It's understandable by anyone, and clearly indicates the degree to which the registry needs attention. In other words, a scan which comes up with only a low or low-to-moderate reading, can be ignored if you're busy with something else.
Uniblue tells us that the scanning engine now goes deeper into the registry and works faster. We can confirm the faster part of the claim, but Registry Booster has always been quite thorough so we detected only a few deeper points of probing. The same is true for registry backups and restore procedures—it's defintely faster in Windows 7 by about 15%, but we couldn't detect such a big speed improvement when running the utility in Windows Vista.
Most important for many users, you can turn off the Scan on Boot function and use the scan scheduler to automate the process.
Use
Read the downloadable manual. It's a PDF document and it explains a lot. Frankly, if you start mucking around in the Windows registry—even with something as robust and safe as Registry Booster 2010—without doing at least a bit of educational preparation, you may eventually do something wrong. I'm not trying to scare you away from Registry Booster 2010—far from it. I'm just trying to convey the fact that the Windows registry is a seriously important chunk of the Windows operating system. Registry Booster 2010 exists because Microsoft created a registry which can at times be quite brittle after mistreatment by new software, older software, and uninstallations which fail to write themselves properly into or out of the registry.
The Scan on Boot function proved to be a bit of an annoyance. It works extremely well, but automatically doing a registry scan every time the computer is booted or rebooted quickly becomes a hindrance. We turned it off and used the scan scheduler instead. The scan scheduler ran unattended and then idled, waiting for the next time we sat down at the computer to provide the scan results.
Registry Booster 2010 is an important piece of utility software in our opinion, not only because it safely manages the Windows registry, but also because it automates a task that is still much-needed by most Windows users (whether they realize it or not). After the first pass on a badly used Windows Vista guest PC, we speeded up general operating system procedures by 20%(!?) and also shortened the machine's boot time by 25 seconds (largely due, we think, to the presence in the registry of old, flaky boot-time programs links to software which had previously been uninstalled). All in all, not bad for a simple registry utility.
Value
At $39.95, it ain't shareware cheap. Then again, similar registry maintenance shareware utilities scare the heck out of us. There have been some good ones, but many of them eventually disappear (software programming is hard work, registry maintenance isn't easy, etc., etc.), and a few get absorbed by larger software companies with the technical support, quality assurance testing and Windows software development kits to ensure the utility remains viable and, above all else, safely accurate. After all that then, $39.95 doesn't seem so bad. We'll call the value typical for good-to-better quality software, and you won't find anything as good that's less expensive.
Cons: Scan on Boot bugs us—a highly subjective opinion no doubt, so we recommend turning it off. The user interface is better than the ones in all previous versions of Registry Booster, but it still needs work to make it consistent. For example, the left side navigation link column disappears when you click the Overview tab, but appears in the Restore tab although it's completely empty in that mode. The user interface therefore suffers from what we call bounce—your eyes bounce from point to point in the user interface because you're not sure where to look in each mode.
Pros: Registry Booster 2010 works properly. None of our scan and repair sessions resulted in broken license installations of other software (a common problem with sub-par registry utilities). The Scan on Boot function which we complained about above, works quickly enough that many people may like it just fine. Registry Booster 2010 uses very few system resources, which means leaving it running in the background does not impact anything else you're doing on the computer. Registry Booster 2010 is a good choice for novice and intermediate computer users, it's a good, simple tool for office network technicians, and its advanced features (we really like the function that can be used to exclude specific registry entries from scans) serve advanced users quite nicely. It's a slick, clean, registry utility that will help you optimize and maintain any busy Windows PC. Highly recommended.
