Would a registry cleaner speed up my PC?

That's the answer to "would a registry cleaner speed up my PC". The answer to your last question also is "no", by the way.

Usually, loading a webpage slow is bad indicator of the computer running slow. Usually, it's only an indicator of the Internet connection being slow. But since you have (had?) both a laptop and a desktop connected to the same Internet connection, it's easy to compare.
- If both are abnormally slow loading web pages (turn off the other while testing), there's a good chance it's the connection (but it's possible also you have the same malware on both).
- If only one is slow and the other is 'normal', something is wrong with that one computer. The easiest way to get it back to its original speed then is to get it back to it's original configuration using the recovery disks you made or the Dell recovery partition.

Kees

Big Steve..

I was reading a post at another forum (just now) when my eyes fell on a thread titled, "Avast is crippling my browser speeds". I thought I remembered you had Avast installed. And I also thought I remembered you having speed issues. I accessed your profile to see if you had posted lately. Lo and behold.. you had!

You made mention of Avast in one of your posts. I wouldn't know if you have the same settings on your laptop, as you do your desktop. I would assume so. But have a look at the thread to see if changing some of settings might help.

Best of luck..
Carol

I have never noticed any perceptible performance improvement to result from the use of any registry cleaner or optimizer even when they showed the registry to have been really horribly bollixed up beforehand.

Things that may improve your performance are scanning for and removal of spyware and adware, cleaning out your start-up programs, stop running all those toolbars, getting a more modern anti-malware program (some old ones are just HORRIBLE drags on your system), defragmenting a BADLY fragmented drive, running sfc /scannow to correct any corrupted system files, and even reflashing your BIOS.

If your problem is slow web-page loading but your computer is otherwise running fine, none of these is likely to help. Modems and routers do not last forever -- they are actually rather consumable. Perhaps one of these needs to be replaced. And if your problem is slow wireless connectivity, there are so many things that can affect performance there that it would be hard to list them all. Have you rearranged your furniture lately?

But in any event, you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. DSL just plain isn't ever going to be very fast, and a lot of web pages have now been designed so flabbily that the designers must presume that everybody has FiOS.

The way to clean your registry is to thoroughly back up your data, and re-install your system. The removes all the remnants of software installed and removed over the years from your registry, and it starts totally clean again. I've found that this is a really good way to regain the "new" speed of your computer when you're really ready to do that.

There are other steps that you can take that will speed things up incrementally, but other than replacing your system disk with an SSD, the best single thing that you can do for performance is to re-install your OS. You can also add memory until you've reached the maximum that your computer will support, of course.

On the other hand, keep in mind that as time goes on, updated and larger applications and updates to your OS will slow it down to some degree, that's life with computers and software. So it will most likely never be as fast as it initially was, since software gains mass over the years. Unless you don't apply OS updates (not advisable), and don't put newer software on your computer (not likely *smile*). As time goes on, and computer hardware gets faster, software designers will design their applications to take advantage of faster computers, more memory, etc. And the same old computers running that software will slow down some, nothing that you can do about that except buy a faster computer *smile*.