Archive for January 5th, 2010

A Little Maintenance Can Speed Up Your Computer

Posted by paul on January 5th, 2010

A Little Maintenance Can Speed Up Your Computer

There are certain computer problems that maintenance alone won’t solve, but this doesn’t apply to most of the slow computers I’ve dealt with lately. I’ve seen a growing amount of anxiety over slow computers recently. I’m not sure if it’s because we have a new version of Windows on the market, or because people simply need to make their computers last as long as possible. (I suspect it’s a mixture of both.)

Registry Maintenance Works!

If you’ve been reading along in the blog, you know that there are certain things that will definitely impact the performance of your computer. Lack of available memory, cluttered file systems and malware are chief culprits in a lot of “slow down” situations. When you’re dealing with a computer that you’ve had for a couple of years, you may become aware of a subtle slowing, or your computer may slow down all at once.

Even though you swear you’ve done nothing, added nothing and changed nothing, your use changes and adds things to your computer all the time. The registry is a centralized database that your computer uses to keep track of just about everything your computer has, uses and does. It doesn’t keep track of files – that’s the file system’s job – but it does keep track of all of the hardware that’s attached to your computer, the settings you use and the software you have installed.

The registry, over time, can grow to millions of lines of code. Your computer is designed to process these millions of lines of code but “processing” involves more than just reading. Instructions are embedded in the registry that may cause the computer to stop processing, even briefly, the millions of lines of code in the registry.

Software products, software updates and configuration changes may leave behind useless or irrelevant instructions. The computer doesn’t know that these instructions have been rendered meaningless, so it reads and follows them, or waits for a response from a device or application that is no longer installed. Worse, it may load additional software into memory that is no longer required. That’s a double theft: first, it’s a waste of time and second, the memory this useless code uses can’t be used for something else.

That’s why I recommend the use of a registry cleaner like RegCure. A registry cleaner analyzes the information stored in your registry to determine if it’s still needed. Useless, abandoned or orphaned information gets removed and your registry becomes much more efficient. RegCure is among the most well-known and well respected registry cleaning products on the market. I wouldn’t recommend anything less!

Photo Credit: Stefano Mortellaro