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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.

A registry consists of a huge number of files and folders. Within these files and folders are pieces of code that show or point to the next place a command will find the information it is looking for. Of course, each operating system’s command will require several, maybe even millions of these pointers to find all it needs to carry out its mission.

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…

In general, the problems a corrupt registry causes mocks those of a computer that is infected with viruses or spyware. Viruses and spyware will also cause your computer operations to slow down. This is because the virus or spyware or whatever parasite is infecting your computer will steal some or all your computers resources.

To get an idea of how much of your computer’s resources are being used, open up your task manager. (Ctrl-Alt-Del in Windows XP) This will show you how much of your CPU is in use at any time. If your computer is idle but you can see much of your CPU’s power is being used, it could be spyware is using this power. It could also be that you have many programs open in your system tray. If you do, closing them should be your first order of business. The point is, if your computer’s resources are being used, you will not be able to get the computer to do anything, even open up your Web browser.

With a lot of your computer’s resources being eaten up by spyware, your computer would be unable to perform such simple tasks as opening up the Web browser. It may eventually get your browser open, but you would notice it would do so abnormally slowly. This is the way a computer would act if it had spyware infecting it or if it had a corrupt registry.

The bottom line is, spyware and viruses make a computer preform poorly. Part of this poor performance may be errors and crashes, or the computer may be just plain slow. The confusing thing is a corrupted registry will make a computer behave in the same way for different reasons.

It is not a matter of whether cleaning spyware and viruses is more or less important than scanning for and cleaning registry corruption. Doing both these things are of utmost importance for keeping your PC fast and error free. Yes, it is too bad we have to use registry cleaners and spyware/virus cleaners so we can keep are computers running well, but the fact is; we do have to.