Registry and a speech at school

I'm going to make a speech at my school for cleaning out old entries in windows. The audience isn't computer savvy so I'm going to do a quick overview of what a registry actually is before I talk with them how to clean it out. I was just going to explain to them that a registry is like a filing cabinet and a registry is the labels for the computer to look up the programs. I was planning on using CClearner since it's pretty easy to use and just walk them through the install and a basic cleaning.

I've ran into a snag though, I need to come up with three "sources" for the speech. The instructions for the sources follows:

Students are required to use a minimum of three (3) credible research sources for their demonstration speech. Sources must be cited within the outline, in a bibliography, and orally during the delivery of the speech. Either MLA or APA format may be used to cite research sources. Failure to include a bibliography will result in 0 points for the outline portion of the speech.

So I need some credible sources for the benefits of cleaning out the registry, where would be the best place to look? I was thinking maybe a MS blog post or such but I'm still not sure. Searching Google comes to mind but I need to make it look credible.

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Comments

tiersten

Is CClean absolutely fool proof? Nobody will accidently click a button and totally screw their Windows install over?

Talic

From my experience it has been. I've been using for a long time and I've done a full cleans on different systems and it didn't mess up the systems. All three of my computers and not to mention my father uses it also.

It lets asks you to back up your registry before it cleans it too. If you want to go back to the old version then you just double click the saved registry.

link: CCleaner - Home

Maybe someone with a in depth knowledge of windows will chime in on registry cleaning? I was reading a little bit on Wiki that there was debatable about how effective it is: Registry cleaner - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. It said something about registry page defrag: PageDefrag - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

edit:Hmm.... maybe I should just show them how to defrag their hard drive? I'm having second thoughts about my topic

dynamik

I think you're making things hard on yourself by trying to explain the registry to novices.

Why don't you cover something like a general overview of how DNS works. There are a lot of analogies that make the name => ip address connection easy to understand.

elaverick1981

dynamik wrote: »

I think you're making things hard on yourself by trying to explain the registry to novices.

Do you really think the registry is difficult conceptually for novices? I always thought it was pretty straightforward. A centralised database of settings used by the Windows Operating System and appliciations that run on it. Granted if you start going into Hive and symlinks it gets a bit messy but on the whole I always thought it was quite a simple idea (well more simple in concept than implementation anyway...)

In terms of the effectiveness of registry cleaning, it kind of depends why you're doing it and what you're cleaning out. If you've got tons of junk DLLS being loaded pre-logon then it's not a bad idea. Problem is I've never seen an automatic registry cleaner that works properly. Either they're too heavy handed and break things or else they're too weak and leave a ton of stuff you have to blat manually.

Plantwiz

elaverick1981 wrote: »

Do you really think the registry is difficult conceptually for novices? I always thought it was pretty straightforward. .....

.

It is, if they are interested in the topic. However, the poster stated it is for 'novices' (we don't know if these are CS students or just High School or it's just a Communicatino class w/ an open topic) and I thing you'll see better results in how to one of the following:

- Install Windows vs. Linux Distro
- IP calculator
- Binary
- Creating, file, folder, organizing, etc..
- AV Install and options
- Types of Backup
- Cleaning up/creating HDD Space when HDD is getting full (delete .zip, uninstall unused programs, etc...)

Keep it simple.

YMMV

dynamik

elaverick1981 wrote: »

Do you really think the registry is difficult conceptually for novices? I always thought it was pretty straightforward. A centralised database of settings used by the Windows Operating System and appliciations that run on it. Granted if you start going into Hive and symlinks it gets a bit messy but on the whole I always thought it was quite a simple idea (well more simple in concept than implementation anyway...)

Well, it's easy if you put it in a sentence like that. How would you talk about it in a five minute (or however long) speech without getting too technical or making it extremely boring by just digging through it? It seems like there are many other things that would be more appropriate for this type of project.

skrpune

registry isn't a really heavy topic...but if you're target audience is folks who aren't computer "savvy" then just leave out the technical jargon and make some analogies about what it is that it's doing, rather than the ins & outs of how it works. I like the filing cabinet reference. My first thought was that it's like a map of sorts, or card catalog in the library (and yes I realize I'm aging myself here). If you remove books from the library collection without removing the reference card in the card catalog, then someone will encounter an "error" when they go to try & find that book; doing a periodic sweep of the catalog to remove outdated references will keep things tidy & prevent folks from looking for stuff that's long gone and will reduce search times.

As for some credible sources, do you still have your A+ books? Do they make any reference to registry topics? You can also try Google Books - you might luck out there. I did a quick search on Google books for "comptia A+ registry" & registry cleaning" and several hits came up. Or you can always go the library or go to a book store to glom the info you need from a book on the shelves.

Talic

I picked the registry because I wanted to explain something that would help their computer's performance. Since they probably don't do any maintenance on their systems I thought they could use a decent registry cleaning from installing and uninstalling their programs.

I'm trying to decide between registry and defragging, I'm not sure which one would be best for a 6 minute at most speech. I could mention PerfectDisk if I do the defrag speech, which would offer a nice performance boost for them too.

This is just a COM101 class so they aren't computer savvy, but I know people use computers all the time so I thought I would do something for them.

edit: I'll try that skrpune, I didn't know about the google books. Thanks.

elaverick1981

Why not do a general best practise talk in that case? You can do registry tidy ups, defragging, anti-virus, malware (you can get a nice 5 min talk just on malware actually since it covers so many areas).

jetdynamics

+1 about general best practice

This way it will make them aware how to deal typical computer performance and internet security.

Vogon Poet

jetdynamics wrote: »

+1 about general best practice

This way it will make them aware how to deal typical computer performance and internet security.

+2
Totally agree. You know what they say about a little bit of knowledge. They'll think they're experts. I wouldn't touch it without the audience having at least an intermediate level of knowledge. On the other hand, they can then really clean out their system if they screw it up and have to reinstall.

steve_f

+3

I'm a tech and even I find the registry boring.

KGhaleon

+4

You could just add me as a source.