For many people who do not know that their computer has on it, a registry cleaner can be a great idea. Oftentimes, people have computers for a year and two, and then begin to experience slower speeds when they are using it. This is not usually a problem with the hardware of the computer, but the actual software of the computer has become clogged. People sometimes install programs, and then never uninstall them. You may have thousands of videos you have watched, but never deleted off your hard drive. Any time you are having a slow down on a older computer, you should try a registry clean up.

Before you start your registry clean up, you should remove any programs that you no longer use. You can do this by going into the add/remove program utility in your windows control panel. Once you have removed these programs, make sure to delete them from the recycle bin as well. A great tool that will do this, and even more is the disk cleanup utility. It removes temporary internet files, cache, and recycle bin files to help increase the space available for other files on your hard drive.

Now that you have removed all the files that you can, purchase a registry cleaner. A registry cleaner is the tool that will be able to do a registry clean-up for you. While there may be a free registry cleaner that does an alright job, there are very few that will not further infect your computer, or that have unlimited features as free software. Purchasing a registry cleaner also offers you support in the rare case a malfunction does occur with the program. Now that you have purchased your registry cleaner, install it. Before you begin your registry cleaning, you will want to make a backup of your registry. You can do this by going into the start menu, run, and type "regedit". A window will pop up, click on file, and then export to get a copy of your registry. Make sure to put this on a piece of removable media such as a CD, DVD or USB stick.

Then run the registry clean-up. The registry cleaner will remove excess program files from windows installer, replace DLL files that are missing, and also find any deep rooted infections from viruses or spyware in your registry. While the registry cleaner will usually find a lot of the problem files, it may not always find everything. You should remove the problems that the registry cleaner has found and then restart your computer in order to allow the registry to reboot in a clean state. With the removal of all of these excess files, you should see a dramatic increase in speed. While not all registry cleaners work equally, most will be able to save you anywhere from five to thirty seconds off the startup time of your computer. Many files are placed onto your computer by programs that you use one time, and then forget about. In order to remove these files, and any potential infections you will want to use a proven registry cleaner to clean out all of your computer's problems.