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When you multiply this effect by a number of software packages that you might install on a trial basis, it's easy to see how the Registry can become choked with useless information. That's when you need a Registry cleaning program. These programs remove a lot of the computer's historic, but ultimately useless, information. You can think of it like a smoker stopping and finding in a few weeks he can breathe a whole lot better.

Auto-updating:
Lots of programs consume bandwidth (that means they're taking up room in the pipe) as well as PC processing capacity by auto-updating at specific intervals. This is not necessarily a bad thing, it can take the headache out of keeping your software up-to-date, but the better programs give users lots of control over when the software can connect to the network and when the updates should happen, giving the user more control over his own processing power.

Malware:
The other major cause of poor performance is so-called "Malware". The term "mal" comes from "malicious" which should become obvious to you as you read ahead. Malware comes in the following basic forms, with specific purposes:

Viruses - we've all heard of these. They can arrive via downloaded or copied software, scripts and controls that run on websites, as well as nicely wrapped in email attachments. Their intent is often solely malicious (that is, their creators have no profit or commercial motive) and they just basically set out to do you harm. Nice. Sometimes they contain "exploits" which are ways that the virus maker can make your system more vulnerable to further attack and can basically hijack your entire system. There have even been cases of extortion or blackmail where users have had money demanded from them in order to have their systems released!

Key Stroke Loggers - these are programs that can be written into other programs that you download and basically spy on (log) the keystrokes that you make. The intent of these is usually to get bank account or credit card numbers, passwords and the like.

Trojans - as the name suggests these are seemingly harmless packages on the outside, but they disguise something more malicious or just plain annoying. Sometimes this might be as simple as a continual pop-up window that tries to make you go to a particular website.

Hacked software - a common way in which viruses, trojans and exploits arrive is through hacked software. This is software that is commercially available under license, but which then gets distributed freely by hackers as "cracked" free versions. They do this by de-compiling and reverse engineering the software and, even though many hackers do this simply as a challenge there are others motivated by profit who are able to insert programmatic instructions into what would seem to be a trusted package. So beware of supposedly free versions of commercially available software!

Help! What do I do?
There are a variety of tools available on the market that address both Malware as well as Registry problems. It's good to choose one that is highly configurable, so that you as the user can either have full control over your PC, or allow the package to keep things running smoothly.

Learn more about this author, Dean Swift.
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