The Techfiles

Defrag Your Registry to Improve Performance in Windows

By Adam Myers ⋅ December 2, 2008 ⋅ Tags: auslogics, registry, registry defrag

Most of you are familiar with the notion of disk defragging. Briefly, a disk defragging utility will scan your harddisk and reassemble all the various bits of a file so that it is written in one continuous flow across your harddrive platter. The end result is a quicker read and write access because the heads on your harddrive are not consistently seeking across the entire platter – once the file is found it can be read back to the computer at the maximum speed. You see, from general day to day usage of your computer, a file can be fragmented into multiple chunks and either interspersed with fragments of other files or between free chunks of disk space. Years ago, defragging made a huge difference to the overall system performance. Nowadays, the file systems are more advanced and the effects of file fragmentation are mitigated. Still, many people still feel strongly about regular defragging and even if it won’t improve performance, it doesn’t hurt to have it your regular computer maintenance routine.

Auslogics Registry Defrag takes the same concept as above and extends it to your Windows registry. You may not have realized this but Windows loads the entire registry into system memory on boot. Why does this matter? Well, a fragmented registry will include chunks of unused memory that still gets allocated by Windows. The end result, you will have less available system memory for other tasks. Registry Defrag is a free download for XP and Vista that helps address the problem. On my Vista machine the scan only took a few minutes. You see my my results below.

Registry Defrag can reduce my registry by over 7MB. It estimates that my access speed improvement is bettered by 4% – likely nothing you would notice but it may shave a few seconds off your boot. All in the name of efficiency though right? A few seconds there and percentages here do add up.

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