Cleaning the registry has become an important part of computer maintenance these days. This is because the newer operating systems, Windows XT and Vista, very easily become corrupted. Also, though corruption could be a problem with earlier operating systems such as Windows 98, it was not nearly as big a problem as it is in today’s huge operating systems.

Registry files are huge and complex. Some of these files tell each command a computer operation is carrying out where it will find its next needed file. You can think of these files as pointers.

Registry Corruption Causes Slowdowns

In a very simplified sense, registry corruption is nothing more than pointers that leads to either the wrong place or no place at all. With the older smaller operating systems the amount of time it took to carry out a few false operations was negligible.

In the new, very large operating systems, one false pointer can lead the operating system hunting for a long time before it discovers the hunt will bear no fruit. Multiply this type of useless operation by thousands, maybe even millions and you will have an idea of the effect registry corruption has on your computer’s speed.

In short, the effect registry corruption has on your computer is that it will slow down all its operations. Sometimes the corruption will slow your computer down to where it cannot accomplish anything. Also, registry corruption will make your computer operate inefficiently. Operating inefficiently means you’ll likely see computer errors. Of course the biggest error of them all is the blue screen of death, and more times than not it is registry corruption that causes the blue screen.

Viruses and Spyware

Spyware and viruses steal part or sometimes most of a computer’s resources. So, just like registry corruption, these things will make a computer slow down and have frequent errors. You can see that simply knowing a computer isn’t working well doesn’t tell you what is wrong. It could mean the computer has spyware, viruses, registry corruption or all of the above.

If all, or a high percentage of your computer’s resources are being used spyware and viruses, your computer won’t be able to perform any task, even an easy one like connect to a Web site. The way to check to see how many resources are being used is to press ctrl-alt-del, which will open up your task manager in Windows XP. If you have Vista, you will have choose “open task manager after you press ctrl-alt-del.

Even if spyware was using 80 percent of your computers resources and your computer needed to do an operation, such as connect to a web site which would require 40 percent of your CPU’s strength, your computer would react by slowing down very noticeably.

To give a quick recap, we all need to keep our computers to be free of viruses and spyware. However, if this is all we do we still may have a computer that is slow and error prone and may crash on occasion. The reason a spyware free computer would behave like this is that it probably has a corrupt registry.

It is not a matter of whether cleaning spyware and viruses is more or less important than scanning for and cleaning registry corruption. Doing both these things are of utmost importance for keeping your PC fast and error free. Yes, it is too bad we have to use registry cleaners and spyware/virus cleaners so we can keep are computers running well, but the fact is; we do have to.

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