Registry cleanup software – regain your PC’s speed

Can registry cleanup software really help you realise your dream of restoring your PC’s performance? It’s easy to think that you memory is playing tricks on you. Was your PC really faster at starting up, opening and closing programs, and closing down when it was new? The answer is almost certainly ‘Yes!’. So why has it slowed down so much now? Computers don’t suffer from old age, do they?

All the components of your computer probably still function just as they did the day you bought it. The only thing that’s changed is that you’ve used it, filling it up with files and new programs. For Windows 98, Microsoft invented the famous registry, which is really just a huge database which contains all of the information which the system uses to run applications, deal with hardware (e.g. hard drives, monitors etc) and accommodate different users. Unfortunately, when you think about the potential number of different combinations of software, users and hardware, you quickly realise that the registry can easily become enormous. And it does – with a detailed set of data for every program, user or printer that you have.

When errors start to appear in the registry, they can easily slow a PC down, or even prevent it from functioning correctly. A single wrong entry, for example, could stop you from accessing your local network completely.

So how can registry cleanup software help? Well it IS possible to fix the registry yourself – you just need to know how to edit the registry, how to find the particular entries which are causing problems and what their correct values should be. I’ve had a look into this, and to me it just isn’t worth it. Due to its’ size, finding the correct key to change seems virtually impossible, and as for knowing what to change it to – I just gave up. Also there is the very real risk that you will make a mistake, and screw up your PC even more.

So the obvious question is, which registry cleanup software package should I use? There are so many, and they all seem to give different results. In the end, I decided to try the free downloads from 8 of the most popular packages. Unbelievably the number of errors they found varied from 217 to 1469. I could I not believe that all of them found over 200 problems with my PC, and I was even more stunned to find that one registry cleaner found nearly seven times more errors than another one.

In the end, I picked registry easy. It found the most errors on my PC, and it seemed to be pretty easy to use. All of the registry cleanup software products which I tested seemed to cost the same, so I thought that more errors found must be better!

Since I ran registry easy, my PC is much faster at starting up, closing down, and opening programs etc. And every week it runs a new scan, where it finds still more errors, which it corrects. The only other thing which I also do, to keep everything running as fast as possible, is delete the contents of the temporary internet folders every week. If you do a lot of surfing, you can generate thousands of these temporary files, and their presence seems to slow things down even more.

Overall I’m very pleased with registry easy. Considering the improvement it’s made (and the risks / difficulty of fixing the registry by hand) it has been great value for money. Of all the registry cleanup software I looked at, registry easy certainly seemed to be the best, and the results speak for themselves!