ParetoLogic's RegCure is currently recognized as the best registry cleaning tool available on the market. Although the program itself is fairly self-explanatory and the instruction manual is detailed and easy to use, we will talk about how to quickly start using RegCure to clean your computer.

Obtaining and installing RegCure should be a breeze. You can get RegCure at its website which includes detailed information about how you can buy it, what you need to start using it and installation instructions.

Once you have installed RegCure, start it by double-clicking its desktop icon. It will present you with a clean and simple interface, and should come up almost instantly. If it seems slow or unresponsive, you may want to temporarily disable your anti-virus program's resident scanning option. This option continuously monitors the activity on your computer, at the expense of heavy performance impact, causing RegCure to run slowly. You can always enable the resident scanning option later.

After RegCure has started, simply click the Start button in the main window. This will present you with a list of error types to scan for. In the beginning, you will want to run a full scan, so check all the options. Later on, you can run only a limited set of scans if you do not have a lot of time, and schedule complete scans to be performed less often using RegCure's Scheduling option. Once you have chosen all the error types to scan for, click Start, and RegCure will start to look for errors in your registry files. You can stop the process at any time by clicking Cancel.

When the scan is complete, a list of found problems will be displayed, all of them being selected for repairing. If you are an advanced user, you may want to look over the errors in detail. Some of them may not really be errors, or may simply reappear periodically without being fatal, a case in which you can send items to the Ignore List. Once you have selected all the errors you wish to repair, click Fix Errors. A backup of the registry files will be created first, and then the appropriate modifications will be made to the registry. After you have finished repairing all the errors, restart your computer.

If you find that the repair process has rendered some applications unable to start or perform correctly, you can fall back to the previous settings. To do so, open RegCure and click the Backup button in the main window. This will display a list of all the backup files, and you can restore whichever you want by selecting it and clicking Restore. Under Windows XP, you can also choose to create a system restore point, which can be used by the System Restore utility included with Windows.

In time, these backups will accumulate and they take space. You can usually erase all but the last three backups to save space, but if you want, you can keep them indefinitely, in case you want to restore your system to a set of original settings.

If you find your computer runs well after you have repaired all errors, you can schedule periodical scans, which you are advised to do. Scanning your computer once every one or two weeks should ensure a smoothly-running system.


Drew specialises in computer security and optimisation. To read his reviews on the top five registry cleaning programs available visit http://www.registry-cleaner-magic.com