With all the nasty computer viruses going around lately, its good to go to the source and clean out bad programs where they spawn. The windows registry is a little-known place on your Windows computer OS that holds the record of all the computer programs installed on that machine. It’s a great resource for your computer to know what is installed for which user on the computer.
However, that same place can a) get really messy because not all programs are cleaned out properly when you remove or uninstall them, and b) it’s the first place that viruses go after to take control of your machine or to otherwise confuse your computer. The Conficker virus was a particularly nasty example of a virus that installed itself in the OS’s registry and was very difficult to find and extract.
If you have programming knowledge, you can go in manually and clean up your registry. It’s not an easy process, but it can be done. Here are some instructions on how to do this. The main thing to be careful of is when you delete programs not to delete any critical system programs that can make your computer crash or unable to boot up. This is obviously a bad situation, which we’ve all probably found ourselves in once or twice!
There are also some free registry cleaning programs out there (you can find a lot on google). Some of these can work, but you should be careful of any free software downloaded from the internet, as it too might have its own viruses! (isn’t the internet a crazy place?) Just read the reviews and do as much research as you can before installing any free software on your computer.
Finally, you can use some premium software packages. I tend to only buy software when its mission critical to my computer, and to me, keeping viruses out falls into that category. The ones I’ve used are System Mechanic, Registry Mechanic and CyberDefender. Of the two, I felt that CyberDefender has the more complete scan and clean process. It found about 200 more warnings and successfully cleaned them out. I noticed a significant increase in my computer’s speed in core tasks after the clean. It also identified Conficker very early, this was before all the big news reports. So I feel confident in utilizing it to keep my computer running smoothly (I run it once every 30 days or so).
Good luck with your battles against viruses!
