Gadgetory

cryptic error messages are something that pretty much everyone has had to deal with at some point from the console gamer suffering the Xbox 360s red ring of death to Michael Bolton from office space wondering what in the world PC load letter actually means but if you're a Windows user you've probably encountered messages telling you that there's a problem with the registry as well as those shady banner ads and TV commercials telling you to buy a registry cleaning utility of some sort so what exactly is this mysterious registry why can issues with it cause problems for your PC and does it really need to be cleaned periodically like some kind of digital kitty litter box well unlike your cat's toilet the registry isn't really a dumping ground it's actually a database on your hard drive that stores important settings for both windows and other programs you have installed you see back in the early days of Windows both the OS itself and other programs relied on small text files called ionize to store settings but Microsoft developed the registry as a more robust solution that can store many more settings than an individual I and I helped different pieces of software communicate with each other more easily keep track of settings for multiple users on the same machine and use a hierarchical structure to keep things organized that structure is actually easy to view for yourself just by typing reg edit into the run window which launches a program called registry editor from there you'll see a massive array of folder like structures called registry Keys which contain a myriad of settings and despite the warnings from Microsoft that editing the registry can cause serious damage to your computer it can actually be a very powerful way to customize Windows so long as you don't go around messing with things that you are unsure of a quick web search will yield all sorts of registry tweaks for both Windows and other programs that you might find useful things like customizing the taskbar or right-click context menu changing the font in the command prompt window changing the delay when you mouse over something between when the information pops up stopping Windows Update from constantly interrupting what you're doing and even adding your own logo to the system window in control panel these are just a few ways that you can make Windows behave the way you want with registry hacks simple registry adjustments are also often good ways to fix common PC problems in fact many hot fixes from Microsoft come in the form of registry entries that you can merge into your own registry with a simple double-click but although the registry lets you tweak plenty of things that you just can't do from a settings menu it does make moving a program from one PC to another a total pain due to just how many settings at stores and how scattered they can get throughout the registry and it can indeed cause issues with Windows if it gets corrupted however with that said while certain errors in the registry can cause problems not even with Windows even but even with specific programs you should be wary of some of those registry cleaning programs that try to convince you your registry needs to be regularly cleaned and that doing so will give you faster performance because the truth of the matter is that often times the errors that these sorts of programs fix are just entries from uninstalled programs that kind of sit in the registry and don't really do much of anything so the chance is that any individual registry error is actually slowing down your computer are pretty darn low however if you are actually getting registry related error messages or have a piece of malware on your computer that may have put things into the registry to make it harder to remove running a reputable cleaner program may not be a bad idea just make sure it's a trustworthy popular utility and not some random thing that you downloaded after clicking a tacky in-your-face advertisement speaking of he 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