A friend told me that his computer was in his words, “extremely slow.” I asked him the normal questions a technician would ask in such a situation, such as whether he has a virus cleaning program installed on his computer or whether he has anti-spyware protection. I also asked him if he had installed any new programs lately. To the first two questions he said yes and to the last one he said no.
The computer was a laptop. You’re running a 32-bit Vista system with 1MB of RAM, which seems to be enough for the kind of things you were doing with this PC. The reason I asked if you had antivirus and antispyware protection is because if you get infected with any of these parasites, a computer can certainly become “seriously slow.” The reason why I asked if you installed any new programs lately is that many times a new program puts pressure on the computer and thus makes the computer need more RAM to relieve that strain.
Scans are free, cleanings are not
Because of working on computers, I see slow computers all the time. In the vast majority of these cases; it is the registry corruption that causes the computer to run slowly. So, since my friend was protected from viruses and spyware and was not putting undue pressure on her computer’s hardware, it was logical to conclude that she needed to clean the registry corruption from her.
I told him about a website that he should go to and get a free registry scan. It’s true, with most registry cleaner programs; if you really want to remove corruption from your registry, you need to pay a license to use its cleanup feature. However, you can get a free scan and that way you can find out if there is registry corruption behind your computer’s misdeeds.
800 is enough
In any case, the free scan told him that he had over 800 incidents of registry corruption on his operating system. In most cases, it only takes a few incidents of registry corruption to slow down a computer. Unbelievably, I have seen teams with over 800 corruption incidents still not affected. However, I have seen computers with only a few incidents of corruption that were almost unbootable until this corruption was removed.
So, I told him that it was more than likely a good investment to buy the license to clean the registry. She did. She told me the results were amazing! She said her computer was so fast that she honestly even thought it wasn’t that fast when she was new. However, the next time I saw her was only a week and a half later.
At that point, he told me that his computer was once again “severely slow.” At this point, I told him something that I should have told him earlier. That is to say, when the registry becomes very corrupted, it is often necessary to clean it twice in a very short period of time. In other words, the registry needs to be cleaned, and then after using the computer for a few hours, it needs to be cleaned again. There are technical reasons for this. However, they are very technical reasons and they are very boring technical reasons.
The end of the story is that after the second cleanup, your computer was very fast again. So while it’s strange that a registry would need a double clean to remove all the corruption, it’s a strange but true fact. Now, after this double cleaning has been done, you only have to worry about cleaning the registry every two to three weeks or whenever your computer seems to be crashing.