Good case for Singletons?

Question

I have an application that has several classes used for storing application-wide settings (locations of resources, user settings, and such). Right now these classes are just

Answer 1

If you don't ever need to instantiate them, I don't see the point of singletons. Well, I should amend that - if these classes cannot be instantiated, then it doesn't make sense to compare them to singletons - the singleton pattern restricts instantiation to one object, and comparing that to something that cannot be instantiated doesn't make sense.

I find my main use of singletons generally involves a class that has static methods that, after maybe preparing an environment, instantiate an instance of themselves. By utilising private constructors and overriding Object.clone() to throw CloneNotSupportedException, no other classes can create a new instance of it, or if they're ever passed an instance of it, they cannot clone it.

I guess I'd say that if your application settings are part of a class that is never instantiated, it's not relevant to say "It should/shouldn't be a singleton."