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If you’re running a John Hodgman Windows machine, the registry on your computer is the warehouse of all the options and settings for every piece of software or hardware installed on your computer. When people talk about “cleaning” the registry, they are referring to removing all the pieces of informaiton that no longer have any use, like pieces of a program that wasn’t installed or uninstalled correctly, or settings for a program that was never used. Over the course of years, the registry can become filled with information that no longer has any purpose.

In the days of WIndows 95 and 98, having all this old information in your registry could slow down your computer’s performance, making it load programs or restart very slowly as the machine tried to sift through hundreds of megs of completely useless information to get to what it needed. These days, with NT and Vista, this is no longer a problem, or at least a very, very small problem. In fact, many people today find that cleaning the registry of newer machines causes more problems than it fixes.

The best answer you’re likely to get to “should I clean my registry?” if you are on an NT or Vista machine is “It probably won’t hurt, but it probably won’t help either.”