I wanted to aks the Mulware fighters.

Malwarebytes antimalware and Superantispyware are 2 of my favorites. I have not used Spybot in years.

AV, I have used AVG for years, still a great product.

Registry cleaning rarely helps performance. Compacting the registry on the other hand, might. I use CCleaner just to do a quick clean, but you should have that installed either way.

 

As you can see from our cleaning procedure, Spybot is not part of it. That is by design not mistake. SAS and MBAM are significantly better. We do still have Spybot in our How to protect youself from malware sticky, but that is only to use it as an additional backup scanner and to make use of the Immunization feature and SDhelper functions which can be useful and require no significant active system resource use.

Registry cleaners are things we don't recommend in the Malware Forum since too many people get themselves into trouble sooner or later by playing with them. And you can read lots of varying information about the pros and cons of using them. Personally, I have never seen registry cleaning change the performance of a system at all. And even experts at Microsoft have stated the performance change by registry defragging is insignificant in the scheme of things. Is the human eye or brain actually going to be able to perceive changes that would only impact speed changes measured in microseconds or even milliseconds? I don't think so.

 

True, but keep in mind that registry defragmenting is good maintenance. Since it has the most moving parts in a computer, the hard drive is the most common failure on a PC. Defragmenting your hard drive allows faster access and less searching of the drive, meaning less drive useage overall. Since so many people never backup, even when warned, any drive maintenance is a good idea. Of course, were wandering off topic a tad, but wanted to add that in