Computers are such complicated devices that it is hard to keep track of all aspects of their performance. But there is no avoiding the fact that my PC is slower than when I bought it: it takes longer to boot up and launch software, and it crashes or hangs unexpectedly.

There are a whole range of different issues, bugs, problems and glitches that can contribute to the sort of things that I describe. For example you can have drivers that are out of date or conflicting with each other, you can have accumulated spyware and malware, you might have a fragmented hard drive, your system settings might be misconfigured, or your system may have become choked up with too much temporary or incompletely removed data.

But this time around I had a hunch that the problem might actually be with my Windows registry. For those of us not familiar with the Windows registry it is a directory which saves options settings for the Windows operating system. Whenever you make changes to system settings, installed software, the control panel or file associations etc these changes are stored in the registry.

The Windows registry has experienced a strange development over time. Prior to Windows 95 there was no formalized, centralized, repository for the various configuration files that different applications create to store settings. Windows 3.X saw an early iteration of what would become the Windows registry with its "Registration Info Editor" which, apart from offering a means to edit these files manually, also compiled them in a single database. The development of the Windows registry continued as later versions of Windows compiled the various configuration files more clearly into a single location and increased the functionality of the registry editing tool available.

In the same way that centralizing and compiling the Windows registry offers a range of benefits to your PC in terms of making it quicker and easier to modify and update, it also exposes it to corresponding problems. These can include increasing the memory overhead and allowing registry damage to make it impossible to even boot Windows. There is also the problem of "software rot" as those applications which don’t uninstall correctly, or which don’t even have an uninstaller, leave redundant entries to clutter the registry, slowing your system and risking software and possibly even system crashes.

Which brings me back to my hunch. I run antispyware and antivirus software along with hard disk defrag and memory cleaner software. So by a process of elimination I know that the registry is high on my list of thing to check out. But the registry could be thousands of lines long. Unless your chosen specialized subject is the Windows registry (and mine isn’t) the odds are that it is going to be too complex a task for your to undertake manually.

This is why I opted for one of the range of registry boosting products available on the market at the moment. These useful applications will automatically scan your registry, and defragment it, to take the hard work out of removing bugs and errors from your registry. You can download a number of different registry cleaners from the Internet, however the registry is a pretty important aspect of the operation of your system and you must be careful that the program you are installing has been designed by a reputable firm and won’t inadvertently destroy your system.