How To Stop Computer Errors and Crashes
Though there are many people who don’t yet believe registry corruption is an issue in Windows XP and Vista, the truth of the matter is registry corruption is a mortal enemy to these operating system. It can cause many problems for these operating systems and the persons who use the computers they are installed on.
Every command a computer operation carries out must travel through the registry. In the registry, each operation finds pointers that direct it where to go to carry out its command and then return the information it has gathered from that operation.
Registry Corruption Causes Slowdowns
In a very simplified sense, registry corruption is nothing more than pointers that leads to either the wrong place or no place at all. With the older smaller operating systems the amount of time it took to carry out a few false operations was negligible.
Because Windows XP and Vista are so large, false pointers waste a lot of the computer’s time and resources doing operations that are in no way helpful. Such operations need to be repeated again and again until the right pointer has shown the operating system the correct path. Of course, this will make the computer appear to be operating slowly.
So you can see, the overall effect registry corruption has on a computer is that is slows down its operations. Sometimes this slow down will not be too noticeable. However, it is possible for registry corruption to slow the computer to the point it makes it difficult to use the computer at all. Registry corruption also makes a computer prone to errors and even the blue screen of death.
Viruses, Spyware, Registry Corruption May All Look the Same, But…
Spyware and viruses steal part or sometimes most of a computer’s resources. So, just like registry corruption, these things will make a computer slow down and have frequent errors. You can see that simply knowing a computer isn’t working well doesn’t tell you what is wrong. It could mean the computer has spyware, viruses, registry corruption or all of the above.
If all, or a high percentage of your computer’s resources are being used spyware and viruses, your computer won’t be able to perform any task, even an easy one like connect to a Web site. The way to check to see how many resources are being used is to press ctrl-alt-del, which will open up your task manager in Windows XP. If you have Vista, you will have choose “open task manager after you press ctrl-alt-del.
Even if spyware was using 80 percent of your computers resources and your computer needed to do an operation, such as connect to a web site which would require 40 percent of your CPU’s strength, your computer would react by slowing down very noticeably.
To give a quick recap, we all need to keep our computers to be free of viruses and spyware. However, if this is all we do we still may have a computer that is slow and error prone and may crash on occasion. The reason a spyware free computer would behave like this is that it probably has a corrupt registry.
It is important, but not enough to keep your PC free of viruses and spyware. On occasion a computer’s registry needs to be scanned for and cleaned of corruption. Doing this will insure your computer will run without producing errors and it will always run at its peak speed.
Filed under: Computers & Technology