If you’re among the untold legions of students getting ready to go back to school, you’ll want to spend a few minutes making sure your computer is ready for the coming semester. The last thing you want to deal with is a slow computer during orientation week or worse, exam week.

Common Causes of Slow Computer

Before you pack up your beloved computer, scan it for viruses and malware. Clean up whatever you find, and that includes cleaning out the registry. Use a registry cleaner like RegCure for best results. Make sure you have the latest virus and malware definitions. If you don’t, download them or update your subscription to the A/V software. You may also want to check with your college or university. Sometimes, they’ve licensed A/V software for every campus computer, including personal computers that belong to students. Using the license that comes with being a student may save you a few bucks in the process.

Before you do anything else, back up your data. Seriously. Whether you run the built-in backup and restore, or copy your files to a thumb drive, or back your files off to a CD, back up your data. Don’t forget to back up your system data, too. Put your backup media – whatever you’ve chosen – aside for the moment. We’ll come back to it.

Run the disk utilities on your PC to search the hard disk for errors, corrupted files and other disasters. Fix or get rid of those. When your system is completely clean and free from errors, back it up again. Pack your backup media and take it with you. You may need it later in the year.

Pare down the number of applications you run at startup. Be especially wary of those apps that “volunteer” to load automatically during the app installation process. There are very few applications you need all the time; virus checkers and malware programs come to mind as good candidates for autoloading. Office applications and game programs should be loaded only when you’re using them.

One last note: most college campuses have open labs or public computing labs, and you may find yourself using these or transferring files back and forth via thumb drive, or via the network. Public workstations are a mixed bag. Colleges and universities usually have a specific upgrade schedule for their classroom and computing lab equipment. You may find yourself working on three-year-old equipment, or you may find yourself working on the latest hardware with a full complement of RAM. Comparatively, the computer you bring from home may seem speedy or downright pokey. Always evaluate software upgrades carefully and make sure your computer has the hardware it needs to run the upgraded software. If the upgrade is a must, you’ll need to upgrade your computer, too.

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Apple has put together one of its “Mac & PC” commercials that focuses on operating system freezes. While the commercial may be funny, a frozen operating system is not, especially when the sudden stop has no rhyme or reason to it. It almost always interrupts something important, and freezes (or crashes, if you prefer) can do additional damage to your operating system and applications that may not be readily apparent. These problems almost always defy your best attempts to speed up your computer.

Thawing Out A Frozen Computer

So how do you get a handle on OS freezes? Sometimes – though not often – a freeze-up can have a readily identifiable trigger. Each time you access a certain piece of hardware, or every time you run a particular application, your computer may freeze. When the trigger can be identified, the problem is usually somewhat evident. Application freezes can be caused by corruptions in the application files that make the computer hang when it tries to access the damaged files.

In most cases, however, a frozen OS isn’t attributable to any one thing. One minute, your computer is running fine, the next it’s been stopped dead in its tracks. Here, one of the “usual suspects” is leftover bits of programming code in the computer’s registry.

These orphans have been left behind by other applications that have long since been removed. The registry becomes loaded with old instructions for allocating and configuring resources. The computer still follows these instructions because it has no way of knowing that the instructions are no longer necessary, or that the application that uses them is no longer on the computer. Perhaps the application is still there, but it’s been upgraded and now needs different resources to operate.

After awhile, the computer is left with a confusing mish-mash of old and new code. Sometimes these instructions contradict each other. When that happens, the OS is forced into an unpredictable state, and the end result is often an operating system crash.

Unfortunately, the registry isn’t a straightforward place. It is a database that is located across multiple files, and has thousands upon thousands of lines of code that mean little to anyone except the computer itself. How do you find and eliminate these little “zombies”?

Many people choose to use a tried-and-true registry cleaner like RegCure. RegCure has been downloaded more times than any other registry cleaner on the market, and it works to eliminate the root causes of poor computer performance. Run regularly, RegCure will have your computer operating as designed in no time flat!

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In my last post, I talked about one way in which you can speed up computer performance by disabling the User Account Control warning messages found in Windows Vista and Windows XP. The change to the registry setting doesn’t speed up the processor in any way, but instead eliminates delays and interruptions. On the negative side, disabling the messages leaves you open to engaging in actions that are possibly dangerous to your computer.

Today, I have another registry change that will speed up your computer by eliminating a delay. Once again, I don’t advocate editing the registry if you’re a complete novice when it comes to using a computer. Editing the registry is highly effective at changing the behavior of your computer, but it makes the changes you ask for immediately, and there’s no way to “undo” what you’ve done short of restoring an unchanged copy of your registry.

I’ll again recommend that you back up your registry before you make any changes of any kind. RegCure creates a registry backup each time it operates and before it makes any changes to the computer. It will also restore registry backups if a change puts your computer into a bind.

Today’s registry edit will disable the autoplay feature that is turned on by default for CDs and DVDs that are inserted into the drive. In some cases, this feature is useful, but you may find that reading and playing a disc takes an unacceptably long time, especially if you don’t really want the disc to start playing in the first place!

This particular registry change won’t affect your ability to play discs you’ve inse rted. You’ll just have to start the discs manually. To disable the autoplay feature:

Start RegEdit
Within RegEdit, find:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Policies\Explorer
Right-click New, then Key. Name the new key NoDriveTypeAutoRun. Press Enter. Right click the key you just created and select New/DWORD Value.
Enter a name for the DWORD Value and press enter.
Double-click the DWORD to open the Edit DWORD Value dialog box. Enter 000000FF into the DWORD Value box. Click OK and then close RegEdit. This change will take effect when the computer is restarted.

The computer will not autoplay discs that have been inserted in the drive. You’ll need to manually start each disc. To return to the default behavior (autoplay), use RegEdit to remove the registry key.

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If the prospect of the upcoming Windows 7 release has you wondering how you can speed up your old computer, here are a few tips that may put a little extra pep into your older computer equipment. How old is old, you say? “Old” in terms of computers is actually relatively recent. If your processor is still being shipped in new computers, that’s a good sign. If your equipment is more than about a year to 18 months old, however, you may benefit from these tips more than you think!

Do The Cheap Stuff First

I’m always a huge advocate of doing the “cheap stuff” first. “Cheap” includes maintenance that can make a big difference in the performance of your PC, but that doesn’t cost a lot. In this case, the “cheap stuff” includes downloading and applying all security patches and critical operating system updates. These updates fix “hidden” problems within the operating system that can slow your computer’s performance, and make it more prone to crashing. Since the updates are free, this falls into the “cheap stuff” category.

Along with the “cheap stuff” is the “obvious stuff.” Obvious stuff includes updating your anti-virus and anti-malware software, and running scans on your computer regularly. You can pick up malware even from sites you trust, so running scans regularly can help you spot and remove this nasty, performance-degrading sludge from your computer.

Another “cheapie” is removing auto-loaders. When you load new software onto your computer, there’s a good chance that the “standard installation” routine that most of us choose will install stuff that automatically loads into your computer’s memory whenever you start the computer. These autoloaders take memory away from your operating system and from the other applications. That could be a big price to pay if you don’t plan to run these memory thieves every time you start the computer. Use MSconfig to spot and remove these autoloaders.

Clean your registry periodically. Your computer’s registry gets filled with information when you install a program. Unfortunately, uninstallers aren’t always good at cleaning up this information when the program is uninstalled. These orphans can clog up your computer’s memory and make the operating system run more slowly. Use a program like RegCure to find and eliminate these time-wasters from your registry.

Finally, if you like to leave your computer on overnight, you’ll benefit from rebooting your computer now and then. Rebooting will give your computer a clean start and will clear memory that may not have been properly deallocated when you quit an application, or when an application crashed.

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Since its introduction, the Windows Registry has been a source of agony and confusion for Windows users around the world. The registry also happens to be the prime location for a lot of very important functions, so it’s not going away anytime soon.

Yes You Can, But Should You?

Can you … should you… edit the registry in Windows Vista? Yes, you can edit the registry, but whether or not you should depends on a number of things, including your level of understanding about what’s in the registry and what effects your changes will have on the way your computer operates.

For support personnel, editing the registry is a relatively common event. Most IT professionals prefer to edit the registry directly. You can edit the registry indirectly, though – often with the help of a wizard or graphical user interface (GUI). The changes you make in a control panel setting, for example, get written into the registry based on what boxes you fill out or check in a configuration panel. That seems like a relatively painless way to edit the registry, and in fact, it is.

If you’ve never seen the registry before, you probably shouldn’t edit it unless you’re following some very specific directions. Understand that the Registry (in any version of Windows) is operational. There is no “undo” unless you had the forethought to make a backup before you started editing! Regedit will not ask if you’re sure you want Windows to accept your changes. It also won’t check your changes to see if they make sense, will work or will have a negative effect on something else.

The changes you make to the registry are instant, as is the damage if you happen to make a mistake. My cardinal rules for editing the registry, therefore, are:

1. Don’t edit the registry if you do not fully understand what you’re doing. Instead of attacking the registry, learn about it and look at it (without making changes) to familiarize yourself with it.

2. Don’t edit the registry without having first made a backup of it. As long as you’re backing things up, back up the system state too!

3. Don’t edit the registry without knowing how to get back into it to fix a mistake. This includes being able to swap in your backup file if it comes to that.

If you do encounter serious trouble that prevents the computer from booting normally, you may be able to revive your computer by using the Last Known Good state. Try this option first but don’t assume that this will save you in all circumstances.

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