There are many ‘registry cleaner‘ utilities out there designed to remove junk from your registry and get your PC to run better, faster and with fewer issues. While some of the actions they perform are safe in nature (e.g., cleaning histories), other procedures can do serious damage if used incorrectly. These utilities can delete many items that a typical end user might not even consider. I was toying with the question – if an end-user ran such a tool with the wrong advanced options and damaged their system, how quickly could IT repair it with Mirage?

So I picked up one of the freeware tools and ran it on my work laptop (yes, sleep deprivation probably had something to do with the questionable logic of this decision). I ran the tool to create the most damage possible – letting it delete over 600 different registry keys ranging from file type associations to ActiveX and COM classes it deemed unusable. The system was still up after that, but many applications had serious issues: some crashed, some gave errors, and some simply wouldn’t launch at all. Internet Explorer had problems opening pages, and Flash froze often.

If I had to call a helpdesk to try to fix these problems, it could take hours or days to troubleshoot the issues. However, all our systems are Wanova Mirage-managed, so I put on my ‘Admin’ hat. With a few mouse clicks on the Mirage Management Console, I initiated an ‘Enforce Base Image’ command. A few minutes later, I was able to reboot my PC back to its fully functional state, without losing any of my data or user installed applications. And all this was accomplished via a Mirage server that was thousands of miles away from my crippled laptop.

Mirage’s image management, combined with its unique desktop streaming capabilities over the WAN, solved hundreds of issues in minutes.  I didn’t have to touch anything on the laptop and didn’t spend any time troubleshooting. Think about the number of hours helpdesk employees spend trying (often unsuccessfully) to troubleshoot PC problems. How much could your organization stand to benefit by reducing helpdesk costs, improving support SLAs, and keeping end users productive?