I got a call from a disgruntled computer owner who told me her computer had become unbearably slow. Of course, the first question I had for her was to find out if she was using a virus scan program periodically.

Sometimes people will have one installed and use it but not know they have one at all. The reason for this is both Windows XP and Vista will keep annoying you until you activate the antivirus program that came with the computer when it was new. Then after you do, the program works on autopilot.

Other types of malware like spyware and adware steal a computers resources which will slow down a computer as well. However, this womans virus scanner was one that would take care of spyware as well.

My recommendation was for her to find out if her problem was registry corruption. I told her to get a free scan to see if, indeed that was the problem. She told me she already had done so and it turns out it was a registry cleaner I know to be an excellent one. She said there were over 800 incidents of corruption the scanner found. Then she said she didnt get the license to activate the cleaners cleaning function because she thought it cost too much.

This conversation took place several weeks ago and I have no idea whether or not this woman has cleaned her registry yet. I do know cleaning out that much corruption would have been an excellent choice because even a small amount of corruption can slow down a computer quite a bit. On top of that, buying the license to activate the cleaning function comes with a very reasonable price tag.

You just cant let registry corruption accumulate on your hard drive because before long it will cause the operating system to shut down. After this happens, you may be looking at a reinstall.

Using a good registry cleaner wont assure you the computer will never have a big problem, but geez! Why hurry a catastrophic failure along? Then again, why anyone would put up with a really slow computer when a registry cleaning will make it fast again, I have no Idea.

Anyway, I had made my recommendation to this woman and it really is up to her what she wants to do with her money and her computer. So, I politely wished her the best and then hung up the phone.

If you ever get in a situation where your computer has a boatload of registry corruption and for one reason or another the time isnt right to clean it out, dont run the computer. A severely corrupt registry could cause the computers operating system to have a catastrophic failure and it could happen in the blink of an eye.