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clum111
regular
Reg'd: Wed
Posts: 454
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Hi All,
My father has a laptop, which is over 4 years old and it's becoming increasenly slow to a point it takes 20 minutes to boot up. It runs on XP and he has on it MS Office 2003, Payroll, AVG and IE. He doesn't play games, music or download anything. He really uses his laptop for emails, letters, payroll and the internet and that's about it.
I am the one that has to update everything, clean out unwanted stuff and making sure nothing gets in. But its just getting slow.
My father has read on a website that laptops are prone to becoming slow and one answer is clean up the registry and cache by using software to do the job like RegistryPatrol.com.
I remember being told at college not to mess around with the registry of a computer, as you could damage the computer, so I have never done anything in the registry knowingly. Also on the RegistryPatrol.com website it will scan your computer, but if it finds anything then you have to pay to have their software unlocked when downloaded to sort it and for me that's a come-on.
Was what my father was reading correct that to clean the registry would help and how would you advise me to carry out the task?
Cheers 
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BurrWalnut
Chippendaler
Reg'd: Tue
Posts: 3729
Loc: England
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Twenty minutes to boot up suggests something is badly wrong not a ‘cluttered’ registry. Have you (he) run your ‘anti’ programs and disk checking software?
Here is an article on registry cleaners that is just as relevant today as it was when it was written http://www.edbott.com/weblog/archives/000643.html
I’m not against looking at spurious keys and removing them but I’d urge caution when using the ‘blanket or bulk key deletion’ programs. I cannot believe there are any performance benefits that can be gained by removing unneeded registry entries, maybe a millisecond second here and there and a few KB of freed-up disk space.
Some registry cleaner programs highlight simple orphaned keys, i.e. deleted and renamed files, giving the impression they have found many serious problems. Others concentrate on the HKEY_CURRENT_USER hive for a specific user, which can survive being corrupted as a new account can be created and the old one deleted.
Try this test on your registry cleaner program. Make sure you have a backup of the registry or have made a system restore point before you try this, otherwise it could be ‘very painful‘.
Run your cleaner program five times, letting it fix all the ‘problems’ that it finds. Isn’t it strange that it finds new issues almost every time you run it? What you have to bear in mind is that many registry keys are dependent on others. Sometimes this relationship is nested deep in the hierarchy. The registry cleaner finds the lowest entry in the chain which appears to be invalid and deletes it. Next time you run the cleaner, it finds the next entry in the chain which is now invalid and deletes it. This continues every time you run it until the keys for that program or process are somewhat messed up.
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The Chippendale Society
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