Your registry plays a big part in how zippy your system is. Your registry has to load every time you boot, and if you have a bunch of old crap in there, that’s a bunch of old crap that is being loaded into memory every time you boot.
Cleaning the registry can be a pain in the butt. There are a lot of programs out there to help you out in this area and I recommend you get one. Some are downloadable for free on the net. RegClean, by Microsoft, will work. I have a copy of CleanReg, another of tons of utilities for this purpose. I found another program called EasyCleaner that does this as well as help with other cleaning chores. Just hope on the net and look around. There are also commercial products out there like Norton Utilities’s WinDoctor, Fix-It Utilities and others.
I urge you to check out the Shop Vac for the Windows Registry, written by Reboot, one of our editors here at PC Media. Some people have reported problems using his technique, but many others, including me, have done it and it look lots of crap out of the registry. Its been awhile since I did it, but it took many many kilobytes off my registry.
If you have a nice backup of your registry, you can go into REGEDIT at the Run box and clean out the registry manually. ALWAYS make sure you have backed up the registry first using the EXPORT function of REGEDIT. I hosed a system of mine one time by getting overzealous at manually editing the registry. Next thing knew, when my system was done booting, I had a completely blank desktop. Heed my mistakes!
Erase It
Pretty obvious tip, really. But, open up Explorer or look in your Start Menu and find some programs you never ever use or forgot were there. Delete them, man. Who needs that crap. Always use an uninstaller if available. Deleting programs straight from Explorer just leaves a bunch of bad registry entries and invalid shortcuts lurking around on your system. After you’re done with that, defrag your drive and run a thorough SCANDISK.
Maintain It
Now that you’ve gone to all this work, you need to keep it up. A lot of people defrag every week. I’m a little more reasonable and I try to do it at least once per month, if I don’t forget. Use that Registry Cleaner of yours every once in a while to purge the registry.
Also, bear in mind that Windows is still an imperfect OS. After doing the above procedures, Windows will run a lot cleaner, that’s for sure. But, it may not always seem like a brand new PC again. Windows doesn’t handle memory incredibly well, so under heavy multi-tasking, things low down. Also, when your system is loaded up with programs on the drive, things run slower. Your machine will always run faster with less software, but that is a Catch-22 since we all want a bunch of programs. So, just do your best to maintain your OS and you’ll get the most out of it.
Happy computing!
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