Proper registry maintenance is a must when it comes to the health and performance of your PC. 94% of personal computers have hidden corrupt and dangerous registry entries and errors that eventually cause a PC to run slow, render programs unresponsive and system crashes.

The window registry contains the database that stores specific settings and options for the operating system. It also contains information about hardware and software programs installed. Due to the nature of the windows OS, a corrupt registry can occur easily from just installing and uninstalling programs over time.

If you're a frequent downloader of programs, after installing and uninstalling programs on your PC, it isn't long before your system begins to show symptoms of an ill registry. The sluggishness becomes more obvious as time goes on and you'll sometimes experience system crashes. This is the sign of a corrupt registry.

Registry cleaners are usually the best option. These tools are a lot more accurate than human eyes and hands when it comes to searching for invalid, stale and corrupt entries in the windows registry.

The only other option is to manually edit the registry and search for invalid entries, granted the user knows what they're doing and what they're looking for. This is a very time consuming task however, no one would ever feel encouraged to do this manually unless they really knew what they were doing and are no strangers to registry problems.

A word of caution: Be extremely careful when delving into the RegEdit utility, it may resemble windows explorer and you may feel encouraged to simply look for invalid entries yourself. Some registry entries have strange denominations and are placed in not just one area of the registry but several. Before you fix your registry on your own, make a back up of the registry first! You've been warned.

As mentioned earlier, the most common registry problems are related to remnants of old uninstalled programs and hardware, corrupt driver locations, empty registry keys, but virus or spyware corruption are also threats to the registry. These are the problems that are best addressed by utilizing a registry cleaner, again the option of doing this manually is not encouraged because of the complexity of the registry and the risk of causing serious damage to the registry.

Because registry maintenance must be done periodically, this is another advantage that users can gain when using a registry cleaner. These tools are designed with schedulers so that users can easily automate the scanning and optimizing of the registry at intervals that are specifically selected by the user.