If you are afflicted by a slowdown in the functioning of your computer, you may have tried scanning for viruses or defragmenting the hard disks in the computer in an attempt to speed things up. If these measures do not improve the situation and you have ascertained that there are no obvious hardware or software errors causing the slowdown, it is time to look at the Windows Registry.

Windows registry keeps track of everything that you computer does starting from hardware and software installed and removed from your system, configuration changes, deciding which programs run, how many users accounts exist on your system and even tracking the websites that you have visited lately. If you have not bothered to clean the registry ever since you bought the computer, there may be hundreds or thousands of entries that need to be resolved.

You may be tempted to use the registry editing utility regedit provided by Windows and modify the registry manually. Even if you are an advanced Windows user with a good knowledge of registry entries, manual editing of registry is not advisable. That goes double for you if you are a novice/intermediate user with very little idea of registry entries. It is always safer to have a registry cleaner do the job for you and here are the reasons why -

1.    Number of Errors - Registry errors can run into hundreds and even thousands of errors, especially if the registry has not been cleaned for a long time. There are hundreds of components in the registry and scanning each component for errors is an impossible task.

2.    Identifying Errors - It is difficult to keep track of what software and hardware changes have occurred over the lifetime of your computer. It may be difficult to differentiate between a legitimate registry entry and an erroneous one.

3.    Risk of Crash/Malfunction - One cannot blithely modify the registry, as the risks of malfunctioning of software or a computer crash occurring are very real.

4.    Cryptic Registry Entries - Registry entries are not easy to understand and determining the role played by a registry entry can be a difficult task.

5.    Removal of Errors - A registry cleaner can identify the level of risk associated with an error - a measure of how crucial it is for correct operation of the computer, far more accurately than in a manual cleaning.

6.    Repair Errors - Some registry cleaners come with the capacity to repair errors rather than just delete the error.

7.    Backup and Restore - Many registry cleaners back up the registry prior to modification and create system restore points just in case a rollback is necessary. These steps may be forgotten in a manual cleaning.