Defragmentation is something that most computer users will be familiar with and with most readily associate with hard drives. But the same problem of fragmentation can affect the registry, and this in turn can cause a reduction in system performance. While Windows includes a built in utility for defragmenting your hard drive, you will need to turn to third party tools such as Eusing Free Registry Defrag if you would like to take care of the registry as well.

Having a bloated registry has a number of side-effects. The most obvious result is that your registry is physically larger and therefore occupies more space in memory leaving less available to other programs. A larger registry also takes longer to load into memory so boot times are increased, and the fact that Windows is constantly referring to the registry, everything else is going to be slowed down as your operating system has to search for the entries it needs.

Eusing Free Registry Defrag performs a very quick analysis of the state of your registry and determines whether there is any scope to reduce the size of its component hives. Unlike defragmenting your hard drive, when it comes to working with the registry it is necessary to restart your computer to complete the process of optimization, but it is still completed fairly quickly and you should benefit from some noticeable improvements.

Any software that works directly with the registry is potentially harmful to your computer – however well-intentioned it might be – so it is good to see that Eusing Free Registry Defrag includes the option of creating a system restore point before anything is carried out so you have a backup plan in case anything should go wrong. The program is available completely free of charge, but you will be asked to obtain a registration code when you first launch it. You are free to use the program without paying – just click the Skip button - but if you would like to help fund development, you are asked to make a donation.