Cleaning the Registry
The Windows registry
has been the center of much debate ever since Windows 95 came out. The daily operation of the operating system
required heavy interaction with the registry, and early problems with registry
corruption led to serious performance problems on many computers. At the root of the problem is the fact that
your hard drive is a dynamic environment where files are constantly added and
deleted. The registry, on the other
hand, is not updated that often (usually only when something is installed or
uninstalled) so that missing files could potentially prevent your system from
booting up in some cases.
Oh, it might help at
this point to say what the registry does.
It’s essentially a file on your computer that remembers important
information that your operating system and all of your installed programs
require in order to run properly. The information
could be user settings, critical file locations, and uninstall
information. The point is, this stuff
is system critical information, and damage to your registry could result in
unreliable performance of your system.
To make things
worse, most uninstall scripts that come with any program are messy in that they
don’t necessarily clean up after themselves.
As a result, the registry WILL, without a doubt, accrue a large number
of erroneous entries over time. These
entries are not necessarily dangerous to your system, but could be under the
right circumstances. The problem here
is that the registry is huge, and not fully understood by most people. Trying to clean the registry by hand would take
days to do, and it would seriously burn out your body!
The good news here
is that there are many free programs available to help you find erroneous
entries and remove them. The best of
the bunch is ccleaner. No, you’re not
reading that wrong. CCleaner is short
for ’crap cleaner’, and does more than just scan your registry for errors. It also happens to clear out a lot of stored
information like recently visited websites, recently opened files, and all
sorts of stuff that you may not want random people to see on your computer.
There are commercial
registry cleaners available for purchase, but I don’t see a reason to pay money
for something so simple as this. All
you have to do is run a registry scan, and any entry that points to an invalid
location will be removed. You’ll find
that for programs that you’ve uninstalled, there are many leftover entries that
stick around. Be sure to make backups
of your registry before removing any entries, however. While you can be safely assured that an
uninstalled program’s registry entries won’t be called by other programs, there’s
no way to be sure. So make a backup of
your registry (most programs, including ccleaner, can do this) before you
remove anything or else you might do irreversible damage to your operating
system.
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