Should you Care for Your Windows Registry Health?

[jeremiah wright]

What are Windows registry? Why are they so important for your
operating system? What can you do to keep them reliable?
According to Microsoft site, registry are "a central hierarchical
database used in Microsoft Windows ... to store information necessary
to configure the system for one or more users, applications and
hardware devices." You can add to that data regarding file types like
what application is used to open them, what icons should be display
for them and so on.
I will try to explain what's happening on 2 of the most common
scenarios that take place on your computer:
1. You get a new program (software or game). You want to give it a
try, so you install it. At that point, new data is written in your
windows registry. That data include program folder, associated files,
various settings that are used by the program, whether it will run on
startup (HKCU/Software/Microsoft/Windows/Current Version/Run/ ) or
only at the first startup (HKCU/Software/Microsoft/Windows/Current
Version/RunOnce/ ). No problem so far. But what's happening if you
decide to uninstall it? That's that point where things get tricky.
Even if you receive a "successfully uninstall" message, pieces of data
remain in your registry. Of course, this is not happening on all
cases, but sadly it does in many of them. In a worst case scenario, if
for instance files "*.abc" are registered to an application that you
just removed and the whole registration process wasn't properly
removed from registry, you will get an error when you try to run that
sort of files. Those invalid registry entries won't bother you visibly
all the time, but they will cause your computer to slow down or even
crash in some cases....

Registry Repair: http://groups.google.com/group/regrepairsbv

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

Re: Should you Care for Your Windows Registry Health?

> Those invalid registry entries won't bother you visibly
> all the time, but they will cause your computer to slow down or even
> crash in some cases....

No, they won't slow down your machine and no, they won't
crash it.

It's the same with a hard disk: Having lots of files stored on
a disk will not slow down a machine (but having a large
number stored in a single folder will slow down access to
that folder).