Les Cargill wrote:
Nil wrote:
On 23 Nov 2013, Les Cargill wrote in
rec.audio.pro:

Then it was done to clean up whatever. All I know is that unless I
rebuilt the machine once a year, it would degrade slowly in
performance.

I've owned and taken care of hundreds of Windows systems. That used
to sometimes happen in the bad old days of Windows 95 and earlier.
Not since Windows XP in my experience. If the system slows down, it's
due to some specific problems. Not from general "dirty registry"
problems.


I may or may not be actually talking about "dirty registry" problems.
I have no data to support or deny that.

I know two things:

1) In order to improve performance of a Windows machine, I would to
an annual rebuild.

2) Using Revo Uninstaller and Eusing Registry Cleaner, that "annual"
at least became a longer period - longer than the machine remained
in active service - call it three years.

Leftover registry entries and disk files don't impact performance to
any significant degree unless there are other issues.


What you say is doubtless true; nonetheless...

What I did "worked". That is all I can really say about it; I don't
have an identified cause, and only a partially perceptible
effect. I don't believe it was a placebo effect. If I had to
characterize the result, it was that general ... latency improved - a
lot - after these operations.

Unless you are constantly installing and uninstalling apps on your system,
your observation about improved performance is more likely to be
coincicental. If you use your computer for general on-line browsing, other
factors such as a large number of temporary files and fragmented drive(s)
will affect the system performance in a fairly short period of time, but
cleaning those up only requires general maintenance.

OTOH, if you are constantly installing and uninstalling apps on your system,
it would be a good idea to learn something about the OS you're working with.
I *can* edit Windows' registry manually or otherwise, but it is very rarely
a necessity, and seldom results in such things as improved latency. The
registry would have to be pretty screwed up to affect that kind of thing,
and there aren't a lot of things that a user can do to screw it up that
badly. ;-)
--
best regards,

Neil