According to Registry Booster's maker, 94 per cent of computers contain corrupt and possibly harmful files, and furthermore the average PC could actually have more than 150 errors due to corrupt or missing Registry entries at any one time.

This is a frightening statistic (of course the company has an interest in milking this fear) and, although most of the errors are unlikely to cause serious damage, older PCs in particular can benefit from the speed increases on offer by cleaning up the Registry. If you're keen on keeping your registry efficient, Registry Booster 2 is a straightforward program that does just that.

After a brief install the user is prompted to run an initial scan, after which the program shows exactly how many errors were found and gives the option to choose which of them to fix. Since changes to the Registry can occasionally cause programs to stop working correctly or can have an adverse effect on the computer, the user has the option to back up the Registry so that it can be put back to a previous state after a scan.

Should you identify certain parts of the Registry that you'd like to omit from future scans to prevent problems, you can add them to an ignore list to prevent them from being changed. Other than the basic scan there's little in the package. There is a record of previous scans and it keeps you up to date with a colour-changing registry status indicator in the main window, which informs the user how healthy things are looking.

Unfortunately, though, there is no way to set up a specific scan after a certain interval, or any kind of smart scheduling, so you'll either have to make it scan automatically every time Windows starts or remember to do it yourself.

Registry Booster 2 is fast, light and efficient, but considering there are free programs available that do the same thing – indeed, Registry scanning is often found bundled with many other optimisation and security programs – it's difficult to argue that it's worth the money for a negligible increase in performance.

Also consider Vcom Fix It Utilities 7 Professional utility software