The more applications you install on your PC, the more its Registry will become cluttered with broken, corrupt or redundant entries. Over time this will waste system resources, slow you down, maybe even lead to crashes or other odd behaviour. RegistryBooster 2010 can scan your system for problems, though, then fix everything it finds at a click, and so restoring your Registry health.

The program is certainly eager to get started: launch RegistryBooster 2010 and it fires off a Registry scan immediately, without waiting to be asked (potentially annoying behaviour, but fortunately easy to change in the settings). The scan speed itself is average, but you won’t be kept waiting long: a thorough scan of our test PC picked up more errors than many of the competition (over 1,100), yet was still completed in well under two minutes.

When the scan has finished. RegistryBooster 2010 displays a simple report that displays the number of errors in each of three categories: system-related (errors affecting all PC users), user-related (errors affecting your account) and third-party errors (those affecting installed programs). A colour-coded “damage level” converts these figures into the degree of damage to your PCs performance and stability: low, medium or high.

You can also view a more detailed report, listing each individual error, but this isn’t so well designed. In particular, there’s no obvious way to say “please don’t delete this Registry entry”. It turns out you can right-click the error and select an “Add to ignore list” option, but that’s hardly intuitive.

Of course, once you know the secret this isn’t a problem, and if you’re happy to simply click the “Fix errors” button and RegistryBooster 2010 will quickly get on with the job of deleting your broken keys. It creates a backup at the same time, too, so if the program does delete anything it really shouldn’t then you can restore your Registry state in a couple of clicks.

It’s a comprehensive feature set, then, and rounded off nicely with a useful Registry defrag option to compact your Registry, ensuring it consumes the minimum of RAM and hard drive space.