Windows Registry Slowing Down a PC?
System Mechanic’s patented technology – Registry Tuner™ – defrags, compacts, optimizes and backs up system registry.
No matter how good your PC might be, it will suffer from performance drops at one point or another. That’s just how the technology works. Hardware components are prone to wearing out with time, and software becomes more and more demanding.
Despite what many people think, you don’t necessarily have to change the hardware components as soon as you notice your PC is sluggish. Unless you’re certain that the hardware is damaged, there’s a very high chance that the root of the problem lies within the software.
Aside from the familiar cause such as a fragmented hard drive or inappropriate RAM allocation, there’s another major thing that can slow down your PC – Windows registry. To offer a deeper understanding of why this is the case, let’s go over everything that you need to know.
What Is Windows Registry?
Before you can address registry-related issues, you need to understand what it is that this registry does.
In a nutshell, Windows registry is a main database that hold a huge amount of important data and low-level settings that the OS requires to run properly. It gathers and sorts information such as:
- Apps that you’ve installed on your PC
- Software pieces necessary for many functions
- Programs that your PC uses to run the hardware connected to it
Data that the registry needs to collect changes constantly. Each time you install an app, change its settings, or do pretty much everything you have to do on a daily basis, certain information about your actions gets added to your Windows registry.
Every piece of data that the registry holds is referred to as a ‘registry key’. Once you’ve had your PC for a period of time, which doesn’t even have to be that long (think six months or so), the registry would have already stored thousands of keys that Windows needs to access on a regular basis.
Naturally, as more time passes, the registry tends to fill up with keys. This can cause quite a number of issues, two of which are the most common.
How Does Registry Slow Down Your PC?
The first thing that happens when the registry contains a large amount of information is bloating. This is because it doesn’t have any self-cleaning features that would allow it to remove the unnecessary keys. Instead, both useful and useless keys accumulate in your registry, which can overwhelm the machine.
Every one of these keys is CPU-hungry and takes up a certain amount of space in your hard drive. As you might expect, the result is a sluggish PC that takes a long time to open certain apps and perform basic system functions.
Another reason why the registry might slow down your PC is fragmentation. As mentioned, the registry has to store a huge amount of information. After a while, pieces of information get displaced, and the cumulative result is a bunch of data that’s scattered all over the registry.
When this happens, Windows needs more time to find the information that it needs to run properly, which results in performance drop.
These two issues usually come hand in hand with one another. Once they rear their heads, you might notice a bunch of issues that prevent you from being productive.
What Are the Symptoms of a Corrupted Registry?
The most obvious thing that you’ll notice is that your PC’s overall performance has dropped. Boot time is longer, apps take forever to open, and even the options that show up when you right-click on something may load for a while.
Even though there are many underlying causes of this, a corrupted registry is among the most common.
Another tell-tale sign that you’re having registry issues is crashing. This can happen to both apps and Windows itself. The reason behind this is that the OS can’t find the information necessary for running certain processes.
If you get a lot of error messages or are suddenly unable to open some apps that you’ve used frequently in the past, there’s a high chance that you’ll have to do something about the registry.
How Can You Repair Corrupted Registry?
Before you learn what to do about this issue, you need to learn what not to do. However contradictory it may sound, don’t simply clean your registry. You’ll see a ton of registry cleaners out there that promise to repair the registry and boost the performance of your PC, when in fact cleaning alone can even cause it to become even slower. Here’s why this is the case:
The only thing that cleaning does is remove the unwanted keys. Even though this is something that you should do on a regular basis, it’s not nearly enough to repair the registry. This is because cleaning doesn’t address the issues of bloating and fragmentation that persist once you delete the unnecessary data.
As mentioned, these are the two main things that cause your PC’s performance to drop. When the unwanted keys are removed without any follow-up process, a huge number of holes are created, which can cause even more issues.
This is why iolo’s team has created a comprehensive solution – Registry Tuner. It’s one of the features in System Mechanic and System Mechanic Pro, and it’s an effective way of dealing with a corrupted registry. In addition, iolo's suite System Mechanic Ultimate Defense includes System Mechanic Professional.
Here are the steps that Registry Tuner takes to optimize Windows registry:
- Location of registry issues
- Removal of the issues
- Fragmentation and bloat removal
- Back-up of the revitalized registry
This ensures that your registry is completely repaired and that Windows can access the necessary information much easier. An obvious result is more responsive software and significant performance boost.
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The Final Word
If you’re facing registry issues, keep everything you see here in mind. It’s important that you remember not to do just the cleanup without all the other goodies, as this can do more harm than good.
To make sure that you can actually improve your PC’s performance and prolong its life, consider a comprehensive solution such as System Mechanic. Its features extend far beyond just registry revitalization, as it can address pretty much all software issues that bring your device to a crawl.
