Are you just looking to check whether a domain name is registered or not? If so, it might be worth trying
dnsstuff who have a whois service. You can also use
networksolutions, who will allow you to type in a number of names (e.g. rgbartlett, bartlett, richard) in a box, then select all possible domains and country specific domains. Pretty quick way of doing it! I'm sure they've got a similar security measure, but as they only display whether the domain is free or not (rather than the whois data for the registered domain) I suspect you can do quite a lot more searches, though I've not tested that theory.