Registry Repair

By Ian Uire

I'm sure the majority of folk realise that Windows settings are saved in the registry.
That would the part that should be marked "here be demons".
Messing with your registry is a certain way of destabilising your setup.
However, there are lots of registry cleaners available to help.

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I heard about this one on a newsgroup detailing Windows problems (really?).
Registry repair is  not a free program but isn't that expensive and may save you a fortune in the long run.

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With the £ -> $ rate just now, it will cost apprx. £15 for a fully featured version of this software.
Clicking on the picture above  will take you to the page.
Now, Glarysoft is quite good about this program and allows a 30 day trial of the software.
I recommend trying it out, you never know what you might find out about your computer.

Once installed and running the program looks like the first grab.
Simply hit the "Scan" button to start. I wouldn't bother customising anything just yet.

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You will get a progress box with some details showing what it is actually searching.

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Ok, it's had a search and claims to have found 48 problems.
You can now either automatically repair the faults or have a look at them first to see what the problems are.

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As with most Windows programs, simply click on the + to expand the category.
You will find that some uninstallers leave quite a few bits and pieces in the registry and Registry Repair will hunt them down.
Click "Repair" and it's job done.
You can also see at the sidebar of the program that you can limit the registry check to specific areas.
If the program does make a mistake, it can be undone by running the program again and selecting the restore function.
Registry Repair saves the registry before it corrects the error.
This is customisable in the options part of the program.
Now, this is worth the money just for the registry part of the program but it also includes some other tools shown at the bottom of the sidebar.

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The disk cleanup part does exactly what it says by removing log files,  leftover tmp files etc, cache files.
You can select which files you wish not to remove in the options part.

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A very handy addition for the price of the software.
This part freed up more than 500mb on its first run through.
Then there's the startup manager part.
Windows tends to load lots of stuff at startup which you don't really need  until you run it.
This is the easy way to control it.

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You can edit, remove , add,  until you're happy with the result.
You can also check what Windows is doing by looking in the local services, or see what scheduled tasks have been set up.

Uninstalls, they're normally a pain as well.

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These grabs were taken on my daughters computer which is now about 5 years old, so there's lots to look at here.
234 programs? She's been busier than I thought.
I used the trial version of the software and as seen above, it found lots of problems and managed to free up a fair bit of space.
I also managed to cut the memory load down considerably on startup by simply removing some of the startup files that weren't needed.
I heartily recommend this as a quick and (relatively) simple piece of software to do what is a complex job.
Even if you don't decide to buy it, give it a try and see the performance gain you get.
 

 





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