Think of your registry as a huge database that holds the complete inventory and location of every file, folder, program and process that resides on your computer.

Because this information is used to tell programs how to run and locate the files needed to perform a certain task (kind of like an huge instruction booklet), when files or programs are added to or removed from your PC, the registry is modified to make note of these changes.

Overtime the registry becomes bloated and disorganized because of these changes leading to poor PC performance.

For a little more background, the registry is a set of files residing on your PC. Inside these files are stored all of the settings that make your programs run and perform their functions and allow for Windows to operate correctly.

For even more in depth (and very technical) information about the registry you can checkout Wikipedia and Microsoft.

You cannot access the files directly to make any changes or remove any outdated or unnecessary entries. To do this you must use a Windows system utility called RegEdit.


Using this utility however, requires a lot of technical expertise and in depth knowledge about not only the Windows operating system but the programs running on your PC. Without the correct know how you can do severe damage to your computer pretty quickly.

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As you can see the registry is not something you want to mess around with and is all the more reason to use a registry cleaner to quickly and efficiently perform registry optimization in just a couple minutes.

Registry cleaner software eliminates the clutter and junk that builds up in your computer's registry from installing and removing programs, deleting and creating files, and surfing online.

The result is a fast, optimized registry that keeps your computer running properly. Without such tune ups your computer can become sluggish, full of error messages or experience frequent system crashes.

As an example of this in action, I put together a demonstration video that shows how the simple act of uninstalling software (even if you use the add/remove programs control panel) still leaves behind traces of itself on your computer.

The video above shows the entire process from scanning the system before the programs are removed, uninstalling the programs and then performing another registry scan to show what is left behind even though the programs are now technically “uninstalled”

As this video helps demonstrate, manually checking and cleaning up your registry is a very time consuming process that requires a lot of technical expertise. Just, imagine having to remove all of these orphan entries in your registry manually!

Repair and maintenance of the registry is an extremely complex task, for only the most technically inclined.

With the proper software, however, registry repair becomes a relatively stress free task because it automates an extremely complex and time consuming task.

The result is improvement in your PC's performance without the expensive support and maintenance bills or the need for technical expertise.

That’s nice and all but that requires you to put a lot of faith in a piece of software to not mess up your computer and make any existing problems worse.

So how can you trust the recommendations of these types of programs to not delete something you need or report problems you don’t actually have?

There are a couple precautions you can take to ensure you are using a reliable registry cleaner but I’m not sure they are very practical and certainly not foolproof. You’ve been warned :-) but here goes:

Because the registry is so complex, and because it is hard to easily pinpoint what you are about to remove can be deleted without causing trouble, most registry cleaners have built in data protection in the form of backups and restore points that allow you to “roll back” your computer to the way things were before you removed any registry entries.

From testing and experimenting with registry cleaner software, I can say that it is very easy in most cases to restore your computer back to normal should the need arise. Usually, it is just a matter of clicking a couple buttons and hitting “ok”.

The 4 levels of data backup protection include:

Full extensive back up of your registry can be performed any time. This makes a complete back up of your registry not just a backup of the changes allowing you to revert back to a previous version of your registry should the need arise.

Move files to a "holding" area (quarantine) where you can easily recover files so that you can make sure the changes do not cause trouble.

Backups are automatically created and accessible from within the program once you decide to delete the files from your system and can be easily recovered and fully restored.

Ability to create a system restore point that is compatible with Windows XP system restore allowing you to roll back you system to it's previous state if any trouble should arise..

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One Final Note


When evaluating registry repair software, make sure the backup feature kicks in automatically when deleting registry entries instead of requiring you to create backups manually. This will ensure you have a backup even if you forget to create one.

One of the main selling points of registry cleaning software is that it will somehow be able to boost the performance of your PC

In my personal testing this is one of the hardest things to actually prove or show but I have tried my best to give you some real testing data compiled using PC performance benchmarking software that basically tests a computer's performance on many different levels.

One thing that needs to be pointed out before I dive into the examples is that a registry cleaner will not magically turn your PC into a new machine

No matter how effective it is at optimizing your system's performance, it cannot change the physical hardware (CPU, memory, Hard drive, etc) of your computer.

What it can do is help the software using these things work more efficiently that can lead to some performance gains.

For the performance testing, I used Performance Test by Passmark Software to help measure the performance differences before and after a registry cleaning

Ability to create a system restore point that is compatible with Windows XP system restore allowing you to roll back you system to it's previous state if any trouble should arise..

The videos demonstrate PC performance before the registry cleaned and after the registry is cleaned. I did not record audio in these videos as it might have impacted the performance test.

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Based on the results shown in the videos there was a 14.4% overall performance increase from using the registry cleaner.


This data at last provides some evidence that a registry cleaner can improve your system performance, just how much will no doubt be different for each system and how noticeable this difference will be is hard to say.