I use CCleaner religiously. Idiots like me who are constantly installing/uninstalling need a good registry cleaner/defragger and I have never had a problem with it (crossed fingers).

CCleaner is good and so is Tune Up utilities....
But i use Uniblue Registry cleaner ...it works fine for me !

so i am feeling really clueless about maintaining my laptops/pcs... i know the basics - disk cleanup, updates, defrag, but after that have no idea. for example, didnt know about cleaning my registry. any reference materials/checklists?? thank you!!

No check lists as such. You sound like you have the basics already covered. CCleaner, Revo uninstaller etc are all good (safe) additions to your tool box.
Make sure to backup your registry before running any kind of registry cleaner though.

Hello,

There are many registry cleaner in the market which claim Vista compatible,

however, almost all of them are NOT compatible with Vista and NOT Vista aware

at all. Using such registry software on Vista systems often corrupt your registry .

Even though many Windows programs will run on the operating system, you'll

always want to make sure that your registry software is certified to run on Vista.

rsvr85? tune-up Utilities 2010! 2010 is newer.

I found that TuneUp Utilities adds allsorts of extra running processes and also slows the system down in general. I much prefer CCleaner and Iobit's Advanced SystemCare Pro ......... the latter speeds the pc performance up actually, as opposed to slowing it down!