I have been using WinDoctor for years with good results. I ran WinDoctor and after a few fixes, ran it again. No problems found. Then, I installed and ran NU. It found 337 problems! These are Software Locations (2), Add/Remove Programs (53), File Extensions (5), Custom Controls (12), and Deep Scan (265). Should I be concerned about all of these problems? I let NU clear the problems and ran NU again, now it says that there are no problems. Is WinDoctor really that bad?
Wow. 337 problems that WinDoctor missed. Is that reasonable?
Welcome to the forum. I am also a long time user of WinDoctor and like you I also loved it. However, about 2 years ago I started using Registry Mechanic and found that it is actually able to detect far more problems than the old WinDoctor. Why do I bring this up you may ask?
You may or may not be aware of the fact that Symantec acquired PC Tools who made Registry Mechanic, and that utility is now included in NU to replace the old WinDoctor.
I don't know if it is so much a question of WinDoctor not being good as it is that NU (Registry Mechanic) simply uses a totally different engine and looks much deeper than the old WinDoctor. Ultimately this is why Symantec incorporated Registry Mechanic into NU instead of carrying WinDoctor forward.
About 4 months ago I uninstalled Registry Mechanic and installed NU.
Two years of experience with Registry Mechanic/NU has led me to believe that Registry Mechanic is much better at detecting errors in the registry.
There was a previous/serious bug with NU and 64 bit windows which was subsequently fixed so make sure that before you run the Registry Defrag of NU that you run Live Update and ensure NU is fully up to date.
Apart from this one bug it has very good registry utilities.
Hope this helps.
Allen
P.S. I'm also looking at your other recent thread.
So do I understand that you believe the large number of problems found by NU that were not found by WinDoctor is expected and appropriate? My computer seems to work fine after NU corrected everything, but I must admit I'm holding my breath. If all else fails, it isn't a problem to revert to the Ghost image I made just before telling NU to do its thing...
Yes I believe based on my own experience that this is normal. When I first started using Registry Mechanic about 2 years ago (again, recall this is now part of NU) I also had several hundred errors corrected which were never caught by WinDoctor.
There have also been occasions where 200-300 or so errors are corrected sometimes since then as well. This is particularly true after uninstalling an application because most software does not truly remove all their entries from the registry. My experience has shown that NU is more apt to catch these kinds of errors.
A similar thing happened back in 2003 when Symantec acquired PowerQuest and changed to the DriveImage engine from PowerQuest, instead of their previous format. This is when Ghost changed from the .gho image format to the present day .v2i image for computer backups.
They acquired technology which was better than their present day equivalent and made changes accordingly.
Thanks for the reassurance about the expected quantity of errors. And, I'll let NU install the other languages.
I went through the ghost issue you described; I have been using Ghost forever. I was a beta tester for the folks down under who wrote it: it was a DOS program then on a floppy disk. I do agree that the change to the Driveimage engine was a change for the better.