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Part 6 of Quick Tips on how to improve your PC's performance
Part 6 of Quick Tips on how to improve your PC's performance
| Part 6 of Quick Tips on how to improve your PC's performance |
| Posted By: D-A-L | Date Added: 13-09-2007 05:24 PM | Views: 1027 |
Quick tips on how to improve your PC's performance
by Nathan Forrest
Hi! Welcome to the sixth brief article in this multi-part series that will show you how to clean up your PC and improve its performance. We'll be giving you inside tips on all of the checks and improvements that we carry out when we visit our UK customers for a "health check" on a desktop or laptop PC. Each week, we'll be showing you how to carry out another part of the full "health check" yourself and it won't cost you anything!
Note that this article refers only to PCs that run Windows and will probably be irrelevant for users of Linux, Apple Mac, etc.
Previous related articles:
Part 1: Performance status (http://www.d-a-l.com/articles/library/143.html)
Part 2: Clearing out temporary files (http://www.d-a-l.com/articles/library/144.html)
Part 3: Defragmenting your hard disk (http://www.d-a-l.com/articles/library/145.html)
Part 4: Checking your Internet speed (http://www.d-a-l.com/articles/library/146.html)
Part 5: Improving your Internet speed (http://www.d-a-l.com/articles/library/147.html)
Part 6: Backing up and restoring the Windows registry
Last week, we said that this week’s article would show you how to uninstall programs and modify the way that programs load in the background when Windows starts. However, before embarking on that lesson, it is very important to know how to back up and restore the Windows registry. Therefore, we have decided to show you how to do that this week and next week’s article will cover modifying your program installations.
What is the registry? Well, it’s a little hard to explain to be honest! It could be thought of as a very large database or repository of information that Windows needs in order to know what programs you have installed, which files those programs need and how most of the settings are configured. The registry is absolutely critical to how Windows and your software operates and it is kept fairly well hidden from users. In fact, most users have never heard of the registry and wouldn’t know where to find it.
Advanced users (or users who know what the registry is and think that they know all about it) may be tempted to manually modify the registry in order to affect the way that certain Windows components or programs operate. However, the registry is very easy to break and a corrupt registry could actually stop your PC from booting up. Therefore, it is important to know how to take a backup and how to restore a backup in the event of problems.
The Windows registry and the way that it is accessed and used has remained fundamentally unchanged since Windows 95. Let’s look at how to access it on a Windows XP machine (which is the same process for previous versions of Windows).
1.Go to the Start Menu and select 'Run...'. At the 'Open:' prompt, type Regedit and click 'OK'.
2. The Registry Editor screen opens, similar to that shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1. 
You may notice that the Registry Editor screen has a similar look to Windows Explorer. Indeed, there is a tree view on the left showing a cascading network of folders (called registry ‘hives’) and a list of hive contents on the right-hand side. The contents can be of different types and are referred to as registry ‘keys’ and ‘values’. Each registry key is a container of a particular type (the type basically refers to whether the data it holds contains text or a number) and, within the registry key “container” is the registry value.
Manual manipulation of the registry to correct problems usually involves editing a registry value or deleting a specific registry key.
Despite the complexity of the registry, backing it up and restoring a backup is very simple indeed. Before making ANY changes to the registry, it is critical that a full backup is taken. Also bear in mind that a big error in editing the registry could mean that you PC won’t start up any more so it is definitely worth keeping your backups off of the PC, perhaps on a CD or USB drive. Registry backups are typically only a few megabytes, although they can be 50-100MB on PCs that have lots of software installed.
To back up the registry from within Registry Editor:
3. Select the File menu and then choose Export.
4. When the Export Registry File dialog opens, choose an appropriate place to save the backup file, such as on the Desktop. Give it a file name that will make sense to you such as “My Registry Backup” and the date (see Figure 2).
5. In the ‘Export range’ section, ensure that “All” is selected. This will back up the entire registry and not just the registry hive that is highlighted in the tree view (see Figure 2).
Figure 2.
Keep this backup safe. If you have a registry corruption and you need to restore from this backup, simply double-click the REG file that you have created in order to overwrite the corrupted data in the registry with the “known good” data that you have just backed up.
I hope that you found this sixth part of our series on PC performance useful. Next week, we will be looking at the 'Add Or Remove Programs' screen and other methods that we can use to address the potentially daunting (and often misunderstood) task of correctly deleting unwanted programs.
Nathan Forrest - Future Systems ( Sussex )
http://www.futuresystems-sussex.co.uk
This article may not be copied or distributed in part or in full from this site and is copyright D24 Media Limited.
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