Are you plagued by a computer system that slowing down to a crawl? How many "blue screens of death" have you seen in the last month? Is restarting your computer useless and lengthy? Well, before you toss the computer out the window with the latest in a plethora of DLL and "mystery" errors, it might be time to find out a little bit about your registry.

So what is a registry?

Every Windows operating system has a registry which holds a wealth of information about your computer. You will find that after using your PC for a short length of time, it longer works the way it did when you first purchased it. It starts slowing down, hiccupping and giving you errors that you don't understand. Let's face it, Microsoft errors are not exactly user-friendly.

How does it do that

Another way to look at the Windows registry is that it is a database which stores settings and options for the operating system for Windows 32-bit versions, 64-bit versions and Windows Mobile. It contains information and settings for all your hardware, software, users, and preferences. Whenever a user makes changes to "Control Panel" settings, or file associations, system policies, or installed software, the changes are reflected and stored in the registry. Constant changing, addition and removal of software, changing user preferences and the like makes for registry errors which in turn slows your computer down and leads to those frustrating shutdowns, freeze-ups and harrassing errors.

Where do these errors come from?

Many of these errors are due in part to invalid entries that exist in your system registry, that might exist because of software you once used and are no longer using was not properly removed. Just by removing these invalid entries, you can significantly increase the performance of your PC.

So, how do you fix it?

Actually, nowadays it's pretty easy. There are tons of software on the market that allow you to clean-up and reconfigure your registry so that your computer acts like it did when you first took it out of the box. There are many automatic system utility software programs that range from shareware and freeware to low cost which allows you to clean up your registry. These include Registry Mechanic and Registry Fix.

So, before you toss out that laptop, try a registry fix. By the way, if you want links to good Registry fixing software that's both effective and inexpensive, visit The Writing Buzz and click on the Registry category.