LostInTechnology

Clean Up the Windows Registry with PowerTools Lite

Posted on 24. Aug, 2009 by Sharninder in Software, Windows

In my humble opinion, the Windows registry is the weakest and the most poorly designed part of the Windows system. If you’ve ever noticed how your windows based PC becomes slower and slower as it grows older, then you know what I mean.

The registry is essentially a database which Windows uses to store information about various installed programs, users and their settings and just about anything that Windows might later have a use for. The problem is that when a program is removed, all entries about the program are usually not removed from the registry.  That’s what makes the registry bloated over time and the system appears slower (and prone to hangs and crashes).

There was a time when I used to spend a lot of time trying out utilities which I could use to clean up and optimize the Windows registry, then for a long time, I forgot about those tools, because I started using Linux more and more.

Now, that I’m back to using Windows, at least for part of the day, I found the need for a registry cleaning utility and found exactly what I was looking for when I came across PowerTools Lite.

Using PowerTools Lite

As you launch PowerTools Lite, you’ll be presented with a dialog box asking permission to perform a system scan. I’d recommend that you let PT Lite perform the scan.

PowerTools will then give you an idea of what it thinks is the health of your PC and its registry. My PC’s health was about 94% and the registry’s health was 83%.  I decided to let PT Lite run and clicked on the button titled “Clean and fix my computer”.

PowerTools then got to work and spat out all the problems that it could find on my computer.

I clicked on Fix and PowerTools asked me if I wanted to make a backup of all the entries it deleted. Since I like living life on the edge or close to it, I selected “No”. If you’re not feeling brave, you can select Yes and let PowerTools create a backup of all deleted registry entries.

The process took a while, but when I was done with it, I had a clean system with a lean mean registry and could finally sleep peacefuly, proud of a job well done.

(By) Sharninder is the resident Ninja at http://geekyninja.com and likes to think about the answer to Life, the Universe and everything over at http://nomadicrider.com.

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Tags: registry, registry cleaning, utilties, Windows