You maintain your car by doing oil changes, checking the brakes and performing those xx,000 mile checkups, right? Right?
But do you do the same thing with your PC?
Surprisingly, many people don’t and, over time, the PC performance degrades. And then degrades some more.
In this series on Technology for the Writer, we’ve taken a look at the basic things that you should do to protect and now maintain your PC.
In this post, I’ll introduce you to the Registry. Not the bridal one, but the PC one. It’s an important maintenance component.
One of the most critical components of your PC is what is called the Windows Registry. Essentially, where your program information is stored.
It’s a big database. When you add programs, lots of entries are written to this place. When you remove programs…not all of the entries are removed from this place. It gets unwieldy. It shows up in your system as taking a long time to boot up your machine or open your programs. The PC has to slog through all of the Registry information for your stuff. It chews up time and chews up your random access memory, making the rest of your programs slow down too.
Few programs address this issue. When I bought my Spyware program, Spyware Detector, the site offered me Registry Cleaner for only $10 more as an incentive. Simply based upon how well the Spyware program worked, I thought it worth the additional dollars and bought it.
Am I glad I did.
After not having the Registry looked at for 3-4 years, the first scan cleaned up about 700 entries that were no longer valid. Then, the program also optimized my Registry, similar to optimizing your hard drive to improve performance.
My system is a lot faster as a result. I now use the automated scheduler in the program to clean and optimize the Registry once a week. Not that it’s a big deal (it may find only one or two entries a week), but it keeps my system operating at peak efficiency.
Which is where I want it.
Do you have a favorite maintenance tool for your PC? There are lots of them out there and I’d love to hear your favorite.
Scot
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