Every computer that I have ever owned has steadily gotten slower over time, often to the point where it becomes unusable. Within months of getting a PC its operations would become terribly slow for unknown reasons. This has enraged me for a long time, so I thought I'd share an answer to one of the biggest causes of this reduction in speed - windows registry problems.

Your registry is a section of your PC that holds information on how your software and hardware should work. Every time you install a program it puts entries in your registry that contain the options and settings which help your computer execute it properly. For example, take a program that runs straight away when you turn on your PC, like an instant messaging program. When you install a program like this, it creates an entry in your windows registry that makes your computer to run this program each time you turn on your computer.

Sometimes when you remove a program, its registry data is not all erased correctly. This means that over time, the longer you use your computer, and the more programs you install and uninstall, the size of your registry increases. Since each time you start a program, your PC checks your registry to learn how it should run the program, having a larger registry means that it takes your computer longer to find the needed entries. This results in your programs taking longer to start..}

Another issue that occurs when registry data isnt properly removed is when you remove programs that run on startup, but the data in the registry commanding your computer to start up the program whenever you start your computer remains behind. This means every time you turn on your computer, it to run a program that no longer exists. This can cause unresponsiveness and sluggishness when you first turn on your PC.

If you want to check your registry to detect any entries that are slowing down your computer, click this link: Why Is My Computer So Slow?. The program available there is very simple and easy to use, and you can perform a registry check for free. After scanning you can repair your errors and tidy up redundant entries in just minutes. There are also inumerable other more complex errors that happen in your registry that I wont discuss this time, these can cause problems like crashes or odd error messages appearing. You can isolate and repair these as well with the registry scanner I mentioned above.