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Repair Windows Registry

July 2, 2009

What Is The Best Registry Cleaner?

The Windows registry is simply a constantly expanding database in all MS Windows system that holds all the settings, options, preferences, and hardware options of the user. It keeps growing each time you boot Windows. Every time your computer starts, it initially notifies the registry to let every installed software know the settings, documents, program paths, and a lot more stuff. The registry slowly accumulates unecessary stuff this way, and this eventually leads to a deterioration in the computer’s performance.

When you install and then uninstall that piece of software, remnants of the application will be left in the registry entries also.

Here’s the issue — Once you have made changes to the registry, it can’t be undone without specialized software (or manual editing).

Manually editing your registry would be a nightmare and isn’t a job the average computer user should try. Rule of thumb: the most desireable registry is still an unmolested registry.

Since the days of Windows 95, most if not all programs will deliberately place permanent entries in Windows registry for a variety of reasons, which aren’t deleted when the program is uninstalled. This registry “stuff” continues to build up until a registry cleaner program is used to get rid of it.

Also, many software malfunctions can help corrupt your registry.

What to look for in a great registry cleaner

Registry cleaning programs are designed to check the registry, identify, and delete any no longer needed entries in there. But that’s the perfects scenario. The reality is, there IS no perfect registry cleaner. All registry cleaners have algorithms which help them “identify” which is an important key and which is trash. There’s no way of forseeing if removing a registry entry will affect system performance in subtle ways. So, any good registry cleaner should let you to backup your registry before you begin cleaning the registry.

Here’s the manual way of backing-up the registry nice and easy:

Click Start – Run
Type: regedit (which opens up the registry editor window)
From the box, hit File – Export
Save it with a name you’ll remember, preferably including the date

If you observe, there’s really 4 kinds of registry cleaners:

Deep scan registry cleaners
Surface scanning registry cleaners
Balanced scan registry cleaners
Fake registry cleaners

A deep cleaner can be dangerous to your system since it may delete some important registry keys by being overzealous. A light scanning one, isn’t much use either; it merely scans the surface. A bogus registry cleaner is dangerous, because it is spyware disguised as a registry cleaner. Don’t download anything just because it’s free!

The “best” registry cleaner is one that:

Defragments your registry
Allows a backup of the registry
Asks whether you want to delete each entry and provides alternatives
Perform other spin-off tasks in addition to registry work

Instead of simply suffering with the slow speed of your computer and the constant crashes, you can actually do something about it.  Be smart and get yourself a good registry cleaner.  It will help your computer run as smoothly and quickly as the day you first brought it home.

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