Remember the day when you bought your new PC with Windowsinstalled? It was lightning fast. It took only about ten secondsto boot. When you opened the Start menu or the load/save filedialogs, they showed up instantly. But, after a year of heavyuse, you now realize that your PC has some serious performanceissues. It takes more and more time to boot each time you startit. When you open your Start menu, file dialogs or other WindowsShell powered components, also seem to always need more time.Your is grinding its hard disk for seemingly forever asif it was thinking whether you are worthy to see what you hadhoped to see.

Modern computers are very complex systems. They are much likethe human body. By consuming large amounts of non-certifiedproducts from unknown sources, you increase the level ofcholesterol in your blood very quickly. Soon, you would have anobesity problem. You couldn't run fast either. This is the samereason why your slows down over time. The truth is thatthere are no certified software products for computers. All ofthe so-called software certificates can only guarantee theauthenticity of a software product and not its quality. Thereare no PC medicine organizations that can certify software. Evenlarge software companies produce software that may harm yoursystem integrity and leave some "cholesterol" in your computer'sveins. And, we won't even discuss the software from unknownvendors that you download from the Internet!

Unlike humans, computers may have many lives. All you need to dois to format your hard drive and install the system fromscratch. However, this is not a good solution. By formattingyour disks, you lose all your installed programs, preferencesand system integrity. Is there another solution? If you need apersonal medic for your to provide required treatmentwithout killing the patient first, you may want to give SmartPCfrom SmartPCTools a try. It's an all-in-one medicine package foryour system. You can download it using the following link:http://www.smartpctools.com/smartpcpro.exe

There are two versions, Personal and Professional. They differonly by the number of features available. I use the Professionalversion. Thus, I will guide you through its features. You willthen be able to decide for yourself whether you need theProfessional or the Personal version.

Back to the "cholesterol" problem. What is considered to be bad"cholesterol" for your PC and where are the veins? The Registryis your computer's blood system. All other organs rely on it.All the vital system information is stored in this unifieddatabase and all Windows applications poll this information.But, there is a downside. Normally, users log into their Windowswith full administrator privileges. You need the administratorprivileges in order to install new software and to configureyour system and network settings. All the applications that yourun receive full administrator privileges as well. This meansthat any program started by you can change almost any section ofyour Windows Registry, including the settings of otherapplications. This is how, for example, malicious scripts fromthe Internet change the Home and Search pages in your InternetExplorer. With the passing of time, even normal applicationsfrom reliable vendors leave some records in your Registry thatmay cause an "obesity" problem. Most programs neverun-install completely! Users rarely complain about such issuesand, as such, developers often ignore the problem. They don'tseem to be worried about such things. No complaints - noproblem. But this is a problem. After a year of heavy use, yourRegistry becomes really fat. It occupies more memory, and ittakes longer for every application to access the Registry. Thiscan reduce the performance of many applications and increasetheir start time. But,



even worse is that some of the leftoversin your Registry point to non-existing or damaged objects.Here's an example: When you right-click on a file in WindowsExplorer, a contextual menu pops up. It is called "contextual"because of the file type specific actions displayed in thismenu. When you install a program, it may add its handlers intosystem menus like the menu that pops up for a file. You probablyhave some handlers there added by your image viewers ("Open with..."), archives ("Send to..", "Compress with..."), printerdrivers and more. If some of the Registry entries, like these,point to non-existing objects, Windows will try to find themevery time. There are also some Registry sections that containprograms to run on Windows startup. They are not shown in the"Startup" section of your Start menu and you cannot remove themmanually. Windows will try to start them on every boot.

Now, for the treatment. Get into a white doctor's uniform andrun SmartPC, your scalpel. The interface is very easy tounderstand. Click the "Fix" button and you'll see two optionsavailable. Let's start with cleaning the Registry. In additionto fixing the problems described above, SmartPC will analyze andfix, or delete if necessary, broken links, device drivers,ActiveX components, fonts, un-install entries and more. As aresult, you will have a compact and a fragment-free databasewithout obsolete and broken entries, resulting in increasedoverall performance of your system.

Not all problems come from the Registry. There is a special typeof file, known as a "shortcut". Your Desktop and the Start menuconsist almost entirely of shortcuts. When you access your startmenu or when your Desktop is loading, Windows searches for thetarget objects that are referenced by your shortcuts. When ashortcut contains a broken link, or points to a non-existingobject, Windows will try to find this object, retrieve its icon,etc. The second option available in the "Fix" SmartPC sectionallows you to scan and fix all broken shortcuts on your disks.

Now, let's move to the "Clean" section of SmartPC. This sectionallows you to clear all the junk files accumulated on yourdisks. Sometimes applications "forget" to delete temporaryfiles, and sometimes they leave temporary files due to softwareerrors. SmartPC will empty directories of temporary files. Itcan also scan your disks to search for temporary files byextension. If you are anxious about security and identity theft,you may want to clean temporary Internet files, delete cookies,IE autofill data, etc.

In the "Optimize" section, you will also find several usefultools to boost your system performance and tune-up some hiddensettings. "Hidden" means that these settings are not availablethrough the Control Panel or standard Windows dialogs. Forexample, you can select whether you wish to log into yourWindows account on boot without the need to enter your password,or whether you want Windows to show the login screen with apasswords prompt. The Startup and Un-install Entries Editorsalso provide some advanced features that are not available instandard Windows configuration applets.

The "Boost Windows" option provides a tool that constantlymonitors your memory, removes unusable blocks and de-fragmentsusable blocks for faster access. If enabled, it runs invisiblyand optimizes your system memory. In addition, this tool setsmaximum processor use priority to the active window. When youwatch a movie, you probably do not want it to make pauses whenanother application does something in background. Normally, allrunning applications share processor time equally. But if youwant to boost a multimedia application to its maximum, you needit to give it an exclusive access to your processor.

Does your experience the "obesity" problem? Is it fullof junk files, broken shortcuts and obsolete registry values? Ifso, it needs a treatment!

About the author:Mykola Rudenko Submit-Everywhere.com, CEO

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