The first time you boot up your new computer there is a sense of cleanliness and speed. Over the course of time, adding and removing software and hardware, as well as adding and removing users, begins to take its toll on your computer. It’s not as fast as it used to be, it crashes more often, and is often bogged down. All of these troubles point to one task that needs to be attended to - cleaning your Windows registry.

Installing and uninstalling take its toll

Each time you install or uninstall a new piece of software, entries are made in the Windows registry. The same occurs with each hardware install or uninstall and user creation or deletion. Software downloaded from the internet can contain malware and this malware targets your registry. The continuous installation and uninstalling of these programs and devices will effect and corrupt the registry. Once the registry is corrupted, your computer will become sluggish, error-ridden and prone to crashing.

Don’t try it yourself

Many computer users experiencing these issues will try to manually repair the errors on their own. This can lead to very disastrous results and almost always creates more problems than what was originally in place. The Windows registry was not designed for the computer novice to tamper with. Taking a quick look at the registry will show thousands upon thousands of lines, most of which are undecipherable to your average computer user. Therefore, the best course of action is to utilize one of many registry cleaners available on the web.

Purpose of a registry cleaner

Registry cleaners will accomplish many things. A good program will back up your registry initially, affording you the option of reverting back to the saved version in case something goes horribly wrong (even with the best of software, this can happen).

Once your registry is backed up, the program will then go through your entire registry looking for any and all errors. At the completion of the scan, you will be presented with a list of the errors that were found. At this point you may either go through the list and choose what is to be repaired or you can opt to have the software do this automatically. It simply depends upon which registry cleaning software program you choose. In most cases, the best option is automatic scanning and fixing, taking the guesswork out of it for most computer users.

Another indication of a good piece of registry cleaning software is if it allows for automatic scheduling of scanning and repair. We often forget how important something like this can be and being able to “set and forget” it is a great feature to be able to implement.

Conclusion

Unfortunately, one of the disadvantages of having the ability to enhance our overall computing experience via added software is the inevitable effect it will have on the Windows registry. It’s always best to be safe rather than sorry so do your research, grab a good registry cleaning program and clean that registry on a regular basis.

Our top three registry cleaner programs that are proven to fix Windows registry errors:

• Registry Easy - Click to read our review.

• Registry Fix - Click to read our review.

• Registry Genius - Click to read our review.