Registry bloat

If there is one area that causes system problems more than any other, it's the registry. Installing new software frequently adds entries to the registry, the area of the computer responsible for storing system information. Remove unused or unwanted programs and orphaned entries are often left behind. If you regularly install and evaluate software, you'll recognise that slowing down of the system on boot-up that informs us of bloat in the registry that could eventually become indigestion! That said, compared to Windows 95, 98 and to some extent 2000, XP's registry system is far less susceptible to bloat and stays relatively compacted.

Apart from orphaned software keys from de-installed software, one of the biggest single causes of bloat is that caused by mail clients. Within Outlook, in common with many other mail clients, we have the ability to block senders– and many people use this to identify and reduce spam. Getting into the habit of tagging spammers in this way can add substantially to the registry size over time, as this is where most mail clients store blocked sender information.

The system registry is essential to a healthy computer. Many users switch off XP's System Restore feature in order to gain the benefit of the additional disk space released, whilst others will happily rely on System Restore to roll back problems they may encounter. But the problem with using the restore feature is the trade off between the drive space allocated to it, and the number of historical restores subsequently available. If problems do not immediately become manifest, System Restore may have jettisoned an older restore point that may have been needed. This is less important for a corrupted executable file than for the registry itself – software can always be re-installed, but within XP, there's no such facility to restore the registry without recourse to System Restore. The solution is to back-up the registry, but within XP or Vista there is no facility to do this either, so we have to use a third party utility.

A good solution is that provided by an excellent product called Erunt written by Lars Hederer. http://www.larshederer.homepage.t-online.de/erunt/ Just as with Windows 9x/Me, the registry files in XP (based on the NT kernel) can become fragmented and occupy more space on the hard drive than necessary, as well as decreasing overall performance.

Erunt has a utility called NTREGOPT which minimizes the size of the registry files and optimizes registry access by compacting the registry hives, recreating each hive from scratch and removing any slack space that may be left from previously modified or deleted keys. Using Erunt regularly will give the user a saved and compacted historical registry archive which sits outside of Microsoft's System Restore facility and which will archive as many timely back-ups as we wish for as long as we want, without the heavy overhead demanded by XP's full-scale System Restore.

The next issue is to get rid of those orphaned key entries and registry inconsistencies, secure in the knowledge we can always restore our system registry quickly and easily. One method is to use the regedit program included with the operating system, but make a mistake here and we could damage the registry. On the other hand, a quick search for the type of registry repair software needed to remove orphaned entries and fix inconsistencies, reveals literally hundreds of products.

When looking for a registry clean-up tool, look for one which is also capable of backing up and restoring the registry before it makes any changes. Some of these work by setting a System Restore Point and don't always detect if System Restore has been deactivated by the user and publishers don't always reveal if they rely on this cheat rather than performing a proper independent backup.

Here is where Erunt comes into its own. Ideally, any chosen registry cleaner will also have a compacting facility (not all do). Although, as said before, compacting isn't such an issue with the XP registry, the process of compacting and restoring can help defragment the registry hives and deliver significantly faster boot-up and system closure times for many computer users.

There are several tools which could be suitably suggested. Registry Mechanic by PC Tools is particularly good. It's effective, well regarded and can be obtained here. http://www.pctools.com/registry-mechanic Armed with a good registry backup tool, there's no reason though not to experiment with different software and find the one best suited to you and your level of expertise. There are plenty to choose from.

To return to the issue of registry bloat when caused by storing spam addresses in the registry. If spam is a real problem for you then look for alternative solutions that don't carry such a high overhead for your computer (see earlier article for some suggestions). Once you have a better solution in place, get rid of the bloat entries before running a clean-up and compact operation with your new software. I'll cite the method for Outlook Express as it's the commonest mail client: <Tools> <Message Rules> <Blocked Senders List> and then individually remove them.

Registry issues may be one of the commonest causes of system problems, but with just a little effort, these problems can be kept at bay.