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Cash for SpeedPrograms that offer to boost your computer's performance are mostly bogus.

By Farhad ManjooPosted Monday, March 9, 2009, at 6:03 PM ET

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Just to see what would happen, I let My Faster PC fix the errors and then I restarted my computer. The good news is that everything seems to work fine; the program doesn't seem to have deleted anything important. The bad news is that it offered no improvement whatsoever. My computer didn't launch into space. It acted pretty much as it had before. What's the deal? Are registry cleaners a scam?

Well, they're controversial. The root debate is over a phenomenon known as "software rot," the idea that programs—the Windows OS, in this case—deteriorate over time, getting slower and buggier simply as a consequence of age. If you think about it, there's no real reason why this should happen: There are few moving parts in a PC, so if you kept doing the same thing with your computer day after day, nothing in it should slow down. One school of thought argues, then, that software rot is in our heads: The computer's registry isn't getting "clogged" and slowing everything down. Instead, we just think our computers are getting slower, but what's really happening is that we're getting used to the speed, or we're running more demanding programs that run more slowly than apps we ran when we first bought the machine.

But few people believe this. Many of us have had personal experience with a Windows machine that seems literally to have aged—one year it's running like a dream, and the next it takes ages to open up the Web browser. Your software hasn't actually rotted. Instead, you've screwed it up. Even when you're being careful with your machine—you avoid free or beta software, you check your system for viruses, you keep a firewall—your machine suffers what an auto mechanic might call "everyday wear and tear." This happens when you install a lot of programs on your machine, or when you uninstall programs that don't fully remove themselves, or when hardware on your system is working off drivers that are old or buggy—or when any number of other problems befall your computer. Windows is a complicated, many-headed beast, and few of us know the intricacies of how to care for it, so it's understandable that it would fade over time.

How can you fix a slow computer? You're not going to get much help from registry cleaners. Even though dusting out your registry sounds like a sensible, eat-your-spinach kind of thing to do, there's no empirical research showing that removing stray entries from the database does anything for the system's performance. But if you want to ignore my advice—say you're a neat freak and the idea of having hundreds of "errors" on your registry drives you crazy—try CCleaner, which does what My Faster PC claims to do but is free.

But you'll probably see better results from a few other simple procedures. First, get an app like Spybot Search & Destroy to search for and remove spyware and adware from your computer. (Ironically, Spybot flagged My Faster PC as a harmful app.) If your computer takes ages to load up, check out this guide for removing unnecessary start-up apps. I've also heard from a few Slate colleagues that backing up your data then reformatting your hard drive and reinstalling Windows works wonders for your machine's speed. If none of that works, consider that your computer may genuinely be too slow for what you're asking it to do—if your machine is four years old, it may not have the necessary pep to play that trailer for I Love You, Man in HD.

Oh, and here's another thing: Be patient. So it takes 30 seconds to load up Firefox? Take a few deep breaths and think about the weekend. It's just 30 seconds. You'll be fine.

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Farhad Manjoo is Slate's technology columnist and the author of True Enough: Learning To Live in a Post-Fact Society. You can e-mail him at and follow him on Twitter.

Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty.

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