Your registry is Windows' central nervous system.

The rule "if it ain't broke don't fix it" was made for Windows' registry.  A single errant modification can render it unbootable.  If you do not know exactly what you are doing DON'T TOUCH IT!

Having been sufficiently forewarned your registry can accumulate a lot of junk that may slow its performance.  There are other, more sophisticated, programs that will clean this junk but until you know what you are doing you can safely run these (in this order):

EasyCleaner from ToniArts.  I run this before I run other registry cleaners.  It's not overly aggressive and you can back up any changes it makes.

NTRegOpt just does what it says it will do - collapses useless hives, etc.  You will notice a 10-20% decrease in your registry size the first time you run this.  After that it will be 2-5%.

Does all this makes your computer run noticeably faster?  Maybe, maybe not.  I think a good defrag is better than all the registry optimizers in the world.

If you uninstall a program incorrectly it can corrupt registry making it so if you try to install it again it won't work. A registry fixer will fix this, that's why it's a good idea to always run a registry fixer.

Bubblehead wrote on Jan 21^st, 2007 at 11:09pm:

ERUNT