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Registry is the configuration center of win system, and the configuration information of most programs is written here.

With the increase of applications, there are more and more configuration information of various applications, and when the application is uninstalled, the relevant registry information is often not automatically cleaned up.

When an application reads the registry, it needs to retrieve and read its own related information. The larger the registry, the more redundant information and the slower the retrieval speed.

For ordinary users, this "slowness" can be ignored; For high-end users, this "slowness" has a cost-benefit ratio problem.

Therefore, clearing the registry is beneficial, but not necessary.

By the way, the program of linux system uses the organization mode of configuration file, which is superior to the registry.

Published on 2012-10-11.

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1 people agree with the answer.

It is necessary if you often toss the computer.

However, you can't use cleaning software indiscriminately, and you can't use several softwares in turn. In the end, the problems will only outweigh the benefits. My usual usage habits are mentioned here [1], hoping to help you.

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Is it necessary for the computer to clear the cache? Does not clear the cache really slow down the computer? What is the best time to clear the cache?

On the so-called "system garbage" in Win7 and his "real body"

1) What is system garbage?

The origin of the word "system garbage" cannot be verified, but in the early days, it could not escape the promotion of various optimization software.

Windows is called disk cleaning, which is directly translated as "redundant disk deletion" or "disk cleaning". Almost no related software abroad involves the word garbage. However, based on the greatness of language and writing, you can imagine what it would be like if the word "garbage" was added. Since windows98, the two most famous softwares are Super Rabbit and Windows Optimizer, which almost unified the layout of optimization software. Everyone's computer is either an optimization expert or a super rabbit. These two artifacts can be described as essential tools for home travel. Subsequently, almost all computer users in the country have devoted themselves to the vast system garbage cleaning work, which lasted for more than ten years and never came back. When many people are bored every day, their favorite thing to do is to turn on "My Computer", ALT+ enter the C drive, "study" how many MB the C drive has grown today, and then kill these MB with various optimization tutorials to realize the elimination of "system garbage" in the bud, and then they can sleep peacefully, feel proud of their computer level and make a lot of progress. Due to the inevitability of "system garbage", many users are very crisis-conscious, and their concern for disk C is even greater than whether the cats at home are fed today.

Optimize software through similar concept propaganda, let oneself occupy the top position of download list for a long time. Although these two computer giants are gradually fading out of this market today, the successor 360 students can go further. They have studied all kinds of "garbage removal" to the extreme and deleted all kinds of files.

One month after the World Cup in Europe, tens of thousands of hours were wasted in many media propaganda. Over the years, how many people's lives have computer users in China struggled? I am a conspiracy theorist, although the person who invented this concept may not realize the impact on the whole computer industry. It's like losing a horseshoe nail and losing Waterloo. But I think since you have done all the bad things and enjoyed all the glory, you can't die with a clear conscience. I won't talk about all kinds of problems caused by the use of "optimization" software in the system, but focus on this garbage cleaning function.

Who doesn't want to get rid of "garbage" At that time, people who thought of popularizing this concept had a thorough understanding of psychological research, and the word can be said to have greatly touched the computer users. Slogans such as "Your system has garbage, use windows optimizer to speed up the system" abound. However, what kind of documents can be regarded as "documents not needed by the system"? Are all kinds of optimization software trying to eliminate their "unnecessary files"? This is the crux of the problem.

As one of the computer users, I pay more attention to three indicators of the operating system, one or more of which I think is also the concern of most people: 1. Whether it is fast, such as startup speed and program execution speed; 2. Whether it is stable, overflowing or reporting errors every three or five times is not what we want; 3. Is the system disk capacity too large? If drive C is always on the edge of full, a lot of work will not be completed. The current cleaning software aims to promote 1 and 3, because these are tangible to users, especially 3, and you can instantly see that there are several MB of free space on the C drive, but if it is not used properly, it will cause the complete collapse of 1 and 2.

So, what are the so-called "garbage"? I think it can be divided into several categories, as shown in the next chapter.

2) What is system waste?

1. cache class

Cache can be said to be an indispensable part of today's computer system. Not only the hardware has cache, but also the OS has cache.

1. 1 windows system cache: System cache is a very general concept, which contains many paths to ensure the normal use of the operating system and some applications. The most common is TEMP, which is the directory on which most system components depend. In addition, folders where prefetching and other pre-reading mechanisms are located can also be classified into this category.

1.2 application data cache: the application directory is mainly the %TEMP% directory, and the kernel above NT6 corresponds to the \AppData\Local\Temp folder in the user folder, where some application caches are mainly stored, such as the caches of roaming, PotPlayer and other programs. 1.3 IE cache: IE is taken out separately because it is special. Some caches corresponding to IE have their own independent locations, such as temporary files of web pages in temporary Internet folders, history in recent folders, cookie and so on.

2. Registry Class Registry is the core part of windows management mechanism. With the increase of system usage time, the redundancy of registry is inevitable. In addition, the key values written by some irresponsible programmers during installation cannot be uninstalled cleanly, which also increases the redundancy of data. Therefore, the main principle of cleaning up the registry is to delete redundant key-value pairs.

3. It may be unscientific to name the system legacy file class in this way, so let's call it that. This kind of file (folder) is characterized by its large space occupation. Take my newly installed system half a month ago as an example: folder \Windows\Installer reaches 6G, and folder \Windows\winsxs reaches nearly 7G. These two folders add up to nearly 14G, which shows that they occupy a lot of space. This kind of file is also a minefield that current software dare not cross, because improper cleaning anywhere may lead to system crash or abnormality. Similarly, the anti-installation file of Windows update also exists in drive C, which can save objective space after cleaning, but it will also bring potential harm (for example, some restore points cannot be rolled back).

Other things that I didn't mention or didn't think of can be attributed to "others" for the time being. ActiveX, system restore, etc. , are the objects of current garbage cleaning software.

Well, this chapter has said so much. Finally, I just want to say "I'm not garbage" to those documents labeled as "garbage".

3) The real entity of "system garbage"

We choose some important "rubbish" to explain.

The first item is ActiveX and Java applets that are automatically downloaded from specific web pages when surfing the Internet. The size is 0 bytes. Please skip this item.

The second item is the most familiar temporary Internet file, IE cache. The default setting of IE is 50MB. If it exceeds 50MB, the expired data will be automatically cleared. What about you? I set it to 400 meters myself. Please look at the underlined part. The development of "for quick viewing" and "for quick access" in the computer industry largely benefited from the invention of cache registers. No matter what kind of hardware, almost all have caches, such as hard disk cache, CPU-level cache, bios, memory and so on. Introducing the concept of cache into the operating system is a qualitative leap, and some people will stare at this disk capacity. It is nothing more than temporarily occupying the title of "system garbage". Is that really the case?

The third item is game statistics. If I delete the record that I 160 seconds completed advanced mine clearance, it will be gone. You don't want this place, do you?

The fourth item is the recycle bin. There is nothing to say. You can find many useful things by browsing occasionally.

The fifth item is key, which accounts for the largest piece, and all kinds of temp folders are generated by applications. Relevant information is usually deleted before the program is closed. If it is not deleted automatically, the program thinks that these things are temporarily useful and can be deleted safely, and there has been no obvious change for several weeks.

Sixth, if you can understand the real meaning of cache files for photos, videos and documents, you won't covet these dozens of MB.

Seventh, the solution file of error report is used when there is an error in your computer. WINDOWS will automatically search for solutions, and novices can use these recommended methods to solve computer failures.

4) Summary

There are many reasons for the decrease of available space on disk C. In fact, even if you put all the software on disk D, disk C will not be clean. The software will create some files needed for its own operation in appdata or other folders on disk C. These files are needed for the program to run. Now the design idea of the software is very clear. Even if you put the program on the G drive, the part that should be left on the C drive will be automatically created on the C drive, which is harmful. For example, QQ chat records are saved in my document by default. Even if ghost happens once a week, it means that after ghost finishes the system, you will lose your chat record for at least a few days. There are also Firefox configuration files and various configurations, such as my appdata/Roaming/sogouExplorer, which is close to 700M in size, and the webkit core cache is also placed here. Chrome is better. It directly installs all programs under appdata. Many people feel uncomfortable, but are Google technicians all idiots? Please check the list of appdata\roaming. Have you seen a lot of familiar software?

In my opinion, appdata is the soul of the whole operating system based on "personal part"! The settings made by your current account for the system, including theme, mouse speed, input method and software configuration, are basically saved in this place. It can be said that the reason why your computer is yours is different from other people's computers is not the size of your hard disk or the frequency of CPU. But at the data level, it condenses your personal efforts and eventually forms your own computer style.

Roaming folder is the soul of software. Any software can only be regarded as a whiteboard program on the day it is installed on the computer. In the process of using it slowly, we will find this software more and more convenient. Maybe you changed the theme of the software, maybe you changed the layout, maybe you changed the corresponding shortcut keys, and so on, especially some highly customized software. The longer you use these softwares, the more you will bring your own personal style. The difference between the software you use and the whiteboard software is reflected in the data level, that is, the various configuration files saved under roaming. Have you ever thought about this very personal style from a whiteboard computer to the end? How long does the configuration process take? Everyone's computer is constantly changing, and this style is constantly changing, but it is always different from whiteboard programs. You use your own photoshop smoothly, but others will feel uncomfortable. Have you ever thought about the reason? )

This is also the meaning of backup. Not just personal data, but a complete style.

This paper draws lessons from some articles and has been approved and revised by the original author.

The next article will talk about single hard disk or multiple hard disks, and Win7' s excellent backup and recovery mechanism.