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Keeping Windows alive – part 3

Registry – The origin of most problems

This is the bad part in Windows as an OS. Windows has this very huge data center where the system and many applications can store anything, most of the registry is meaningless for a normal human, given that you might be able to track down and understand a couple of keys. But still very hard to make out. If you like a challenge type “regedit” in your run dialog.

Anyway, if you take a look at your registry you might find information about programs that you have removed for over a year. See, windows has this defect “it doesn’t keep track” when it comes to the registry, and most of software creators don’t even bother to cleanup when their installers/uninstallers.

This is where software like CCleaner – Another CNet highly decorated tool – comes handy. This easy and visually appealing tool can help you clean up your disk in a more advanced way the the windows Disk Cleanup utility. And it’s capable of detecting some of the applications that store temporary data and cleanup after them.

Anyway it has wonderful power for such a small tool. But what does it have to do with the Registry?

If you click the “Registry” button you’ll see a list of registry problem names that you might have heard of. Select the things you’d like CCleaner to look for, but be careful it’s not that easy, the consequences might be harmful to your computer.

After selecting the issues you’d like detected click the “Scan for issues” button will do it’s work and add the found registry problems to the list on the right with a check next to each of them. Checked problem are marked for fixing which means removal from the registry.

If you get any results you’ll see the “Fix selected issues” button enabled. Click it and CCleaner will prompt you to create a backup of all the registry keys it’s going to modify. Do NOT hesitate, say yes always and keep a backup for a couple of days until you make sure everything is working fine, The backup is very easy to restore, just double click the backup file and all the registry keys will be restored.

Now you can begin fixing issues 1 at a time or all in once, this operation might take some time and the application might stop responding if you have too many problems.

Anyway now that you have a clean registry try repeating the whole thing, new problem might be detected after the removal of old ones.

Now you have a huge registry with fewer problems (nothing can take care of all the problems so far). That registry as you might know is stored on your disk and for being so critical might need some extra treatment.

Any disk defragmenter will fail to handle registry files successfully. And that’s why AusLogics came up with another highly decorated great tool called “Auslogics Registry Defrag” which simply keeps your registry as compact as possible install and use it, and you’ll see the difference. It’ll increase the performance of your Windows by a good percentage.

And that’s it, you now should have your Windows as good as new.

Good luck and I hope you enjoyed reading this long article