I got a call from a disgruntled computer owner who told me her computer had become unbearably slow. Of course, the first question I had for her was to find out if she was using a virus scan program periodically.
It is actually possible to have a virus scanner up and running on your computer and not be sure you do because a lot of the job of virus protection is setup at the factory and the customer buys the computer with a virus cleaner preinstalled.
Other types of malware like spyware and adware steal a computers resources which will slow down a computer as well. However, this womans virus scanner was one that would take care of spyware as well.
So, I told her where to go online to get a free registry scan. Unbelievably, she said her friend, who was actually a customer of mine, had recommended a registry scan with my personal favorite registry scanner and it turned up 838 incidents of registry corruption. However, she didnt purchase the license to repair the registry corruption because it was too expensive.
This conversation took place several weeks ago and I have no idea whether or not this woman has cleaned her registry yet. I do know cleaning out that much corruption would have been an excellent choice because even a small amount of corruption can slow down a computer quite a bit. On top of that, buying the license to activate the cleaning function comes with a very reasonable price tag.
You just cant let registry corruption accumulate on your hard drive because before long it will cause the operating system to shut down. After this happens, you may be looking at a reinstall.
Sure this is an outside chance that there is something else slowing down the computer other than registry corruption, but it is a small chance. Besides, why would you not get your registry cleaned out when you know it is terribly corrupt?
Anyway, I had made my recommendation to this woman and it really is up to her what she wants to do with her money and her computer. So, I politely wished her the best and then hung up the phone.
If you ever get in a situation where your computer has a boatload of registry corruption and for one reason or another the time isnt right to clean it out, dont run the computer. A severely corrupt registry could cause the computers operating system to have a catastrophic failure and it could happen in the blink of an eye.