I was struck with an interesting phenomenon the other day. Riding my bicycle along a section of US41 and because of the amount of traffic, traffic lights and maybe some other issues I couldn’t see, I was actually traveling faster than the cars trying to get to their destinations. County and state spend millions of tax dollars on computer controlled lights, intersection control islands, stripes, arrows, signs and driver education only to watch traffic grind ever slower and slower. They even hire more consultants to suggest improvements that ultimately lead to… longer commute times.
Computers are similar to highways. It seems that the longer we have a computer the slower it gets. Like our roads, the obvious answer reminds me of the question about ducks flying south for the winter in the familiar V pattern. . Why is one side of the V longer than the other? Because there are more ducks on that side. Why does traffic move slower? More cars. Why do our computers run slower? More programs.
How can we improve performance? The answer seems self evident. For roads, remove cars. Computers, remove programs. But even this solution poses its own problems. There is an area just north of Veterans Blvd that was platted many years ago. Roads were put in, but nothing else. There is virtually no traffic but it is used to illegally dump, and off-road vehicles tear up the landscape. We could resolve some of the issues by tearing up the roads and returning the area to its natural state. The same plan can be used to clean up our computers by removing unused programs and files. But a magic bullet would be faster, so we hire more consultants for the roads and we download Registry cleaners that promise to speed up our computers after only a few minutes and $49.95.
What is the registry? The registry is a system-defined database used by the Windows operating system to store configuration information. More simply, it is a road system that the computer uses to find everything loaded on it and make use of it. It also stores the settings we tell a program to use when we install it. It makes sense that if parts of the road become unusable, or go to dead ends, our computer will slow down as it navigates through the maze.
Many folks have downloaded purported registry cleaning programs that promise to instantly remove dead registry entries and thereby speed up our computers. With flashing screens and impressive looking charts they boldly declare our computers are riddled with registry errors. Errors? What they are locating are leftover registry entries that are tied to nothing. Cleaning the unused entries from the registry would at best speed up any search for information within the registry which almost no one does. Oddly, if it were this simple, one wonders why Microsoft, the creators of Windows, does not provide a registry cleaner. They should know the ins and outs of the registry better than anyone. Perhaps a clue comes from Mark Russinovich, Ph.D. Computer Engineering, Microsoft Technical Fellow who states "A few hundred kilobytes of unused keys and values causes no noticeable performance impact on system operation. Even if the registry was massively bloated there would be little impact on the performance of anything other than exhaustive searches."
Registry cleaners, while apparently having no effect on performance, do allow us to perform registry hygiene by cleaning up dead entries. Generally these dead keys and values are created by the removal of programs via the Add/Remove feature in Windows. The problem with the $49 registry cleaners is that they have an automatic feature that most of us use. This automatic feature does not discriminate; it just removes keys and values. To demonstrate the danger of the automatic feature, I recently tested one of the “leading” registry cleaners on my test PC. It ran a scan, found over 400 registry “errors” and then removed them. I restarted the PC and it would not boot up. Apparently some of the registry “errors” were critical to the operation of Windows. The moral here is that if you must use a registry cleaner, find one that can be run in manual mode, has a backup feature that allows the restoration of entries removed from the registry, remove only those entries left from program removal and is FREE such as Piniforms CCleaner or included with a leading antivirus suite such as Norton’s PC Tuneup.
McAfee and Norton Security Suites along with most major antivirus programs provide a registry cleaner under the tools section. Another FREE cleaner can be found at www.ccleaner.com that has a backup mode just in case. Before taking any action regarding the registry be sure that you only change values in the registry that you understand or have been instructed to change by a trusted source. Be sure to back up the registry before making any changes.
Keep that traffic flowing.
Speaking of Bicycling, Check out www.peaceriverridersbicycleclub.com for the upcoming Wheels and Wings IV bicycle event. It’s a Bicycle Ride an event and a party!
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Grumbles From The Keyboard: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love My Computer: Courtland Nederveld: 9781467985895: Books
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Epicuria: An Adventure That Really Cooks!: Court Nederveld: 9781456561734: Books
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