Nobody likes leftover night for dinner. Food that tasted good the first time is just never the same when reheated three days later. PC leftovers are no better, and they can slow your computer to a crawl.
What are PC leftovers and where do they come from? PC leftovers are the results of running programs on your computer. The entire purpose of owning a computer is to run software. Unfortunately, every time you install software it makes widespread additions to the Windows Registry and adds “temporary” files to your computer that are anything but temporary.
All of this adds to the clutter that clogs your computer when it multitasks. The system slogs its way through a ton of no longer useful information in order to find and execute what it needs.
When you surf the Internet, for example, many programs install themselves through Internet pages in order to track your Internet usage and transmit data back to their hosts. Such programs usually burrow into the registry as well, associating themselves with numerous keys and values.
Some have multiple keys under multiple program names in multiple folders. It can be very difficult to track and remove these infected keys and values without removing something important. No one wants to see the “blue screen of death” because they tinkered with the wrong key in the registry.
Some programs do not have an uninstall feature, and even many that do leave more refuse behind than a Labor Day parade. Keys and subkeys often remain in the registry because they “might impact other programs.” Since the registry itself is really nothing more that a large repository, it has no mechanism to check its information with the installed programs – so it cannot determine by itself if information is needed or affects anything.
That is why software exists to make the comparison for you. It’s important to keep you registry clean as it can become quite bloated after weeks or months of usage storing Internet histories, temporary file information, and a ton of other useless information. In order to prevent elimination of potentially important information, it saves all information, no matter how potentially irrelevant.
