Archive for December 4th, 2009

Do you constantly seem to be asking yourself – why is my computer so slow? I certainly used to. Within months of getting a computer its operations would become painfully slow for unknown reasons. This has annoyed me for ages, so I figured I’d share an answer to one of the most common reasons behind this degradation in usability – windows registry inefficiencies.

All windows computers have a database called the registery. This is where information is stored that helps your software and hardware work properly. An entry is added to the registry whenever you install a program that tells windows how or when to run it, and many other variables that it might have. For example, take a program that starts straight away when you start your computer, like an instant messaging program. When you install a program like this, it creates an entry in your windows registry that instructs your computer to run this program each time you start your computer.

Occasionally when you uninstall a program, its registry entries are not all erased correctly. This means that as time progresses, the longer you use your computer, and the more programs you install and uninstall, the size of your registry grows. Whenever you start a program, your computer consults your registry to decide how to run the program, having a larger registry means that it takes your computer a greater amount of time to find the needed entries. This results in your programs being much slower to start..}

Another issue that arises when registry entries aren’t correctly removed is when you uninstall programs that run on startup, but the data in the registry telling your computer to start up the program each time you turn on your computer is not correctly removed. This means every time you turn on your computer, it attempts to run a program that no longer exists. This can create large delays and sluggishness when you first turn on your computer.

There are hundreds of other, more complicated errors that occur in your registry, that produce problems like sluggish startups and program load times to major crashes. If your computer is running slow, or is giving lots of errors, try performing a registry scan and repair. A great website for this is Why Is My Computer So Slow? they offer a free registry scan, and the program is very easy to use. Most of the time these registry problems can be fixed in just minutes with the right tool, and can usually get your computer working as fast as when you bought it.