Uniblue Registry Booster 2009 – Review and Benchmark

Registry Cleaners are the topic of intense discussion among tech gurus. Do we need a Registry Cleaner? The opinion is certainly divided. While many Windows Gurus dismiss Registry Cleaners as unnecessary and dangerous, there are others who swear by it. I would probably fall in the later camp. I am a huge fan of TuneUp Utilities and its built in registry cleaner. I have seen it work wonders. Its registry cleaner once repaired an un-bootable system (after Windows Startup Recovery had failed) and on another instance fixed my friends frequent system freeze-ups at startup. Uniblue Registry Cleaner first attracted my attention when I chanced upon a review by WhatTheTech. They went from criticising Registry Cleaners for being fickle natured and dangerous to recommending Uniblue Registry Cleaner.

Interface and Features

Uniblue Registry Booster has a simple and attractive interface. It provides a quick overview of your current system status and allows immediate access to all the necessary functions. Scanning speed of Uniblue is mediocre. It isn’t terribly slow but is definitely slower than TuneUp Utilities. You also have the option of going for a complete scan, which is considerably more time consuming. On first scan it detected 384 invalid registry entries. Uniblue prompted me to take a registry backup and fixed (deleted) all the invalid registry entries.

The other core feature of Uniblue Registry Booster is the registry defragmenter. The defragmenter compacts your registry and is supposed to make system startup faster. Once again, there isn’t really much to write about here. You click on a button and Uniblue takes care of the rest. The only thing missing here is an after-optimisation report telling me how much registry compaction was achieved.

Performance

So, how does Uniblue Registry Booster perform? I measured my system’s boot time before and after performing the registry repairs in order to get an idea about the performance impact of Registry Booster. I used the average of 5 trials:

Before: 53.316s After: 50.748s

This amounts to a 4.8% gain in boot speed, which is fairly impressive if you take into account that my machine is probably better tuned that most. I had cleaned my system with TuneUp Utilities approximately two weeks before performing the test. WhatTheTech had experienced 12.9% improvement in Windows Vista and 14.4% in Windows XP.

While choosing a registry cleaner one must be extremely careful, as there are plenty of rogue utilities around. Registry is an extremely critical component of your system and an ill-designed registry cleaner can mess your system up badly. Uniblue seems to be a safe bet since it is a Microsoft Gold Certified partner. I didn’t notice any adverse impact on system stability since performing the registry cleanup.

Final Words

While it is hard to accurately review the efficiency of a registry cleaner Uniblue Registry Booster seems to have a positive impact on system performance. In my tests the Windows startup time on all 5 occasions after using Uniblue were less than the average of original startup time required. By default Registry Booster configures itself to automatically launch at windows startup which is both annoying and stupid. You don’t need to clean your registry everyday and there is no need for software like Registry Booster to run in the background. Thankfully, it is easy to change this setting. I can’t really say how Registry Booster performs when compared to other similar software, since carrying out that kind of comparison is extremely time consuming. However, I can confidently say that Registry Booster does its work well.

Registry Booster 2009 Download (3.97 MB)
Registry Booster 2009 Webpage
Platforms Supported : Windows 2000, XP, Vista and Windows 7
License : Commercial Software – $29.95
Version Reviewed : 2.0.998