Fight Slow System Performance

File defragmentation, registry defragmentation, eliminating unused data such as temporary files and cleaning the registry of invalid entries are some of the practices leading to keeping the performance of your PC to a higher level. And the instruments on the market giving you just that range from freebies to paid products boasting to deliver fast results in just a few clicks.

Registry cleaning and defragmentation are by far the two most efficient ways of preventing your computer from suffering a performance drop. If defragmentation is included in Windows (as poor as it performs, it still affects positively the system), registry cleaning has been left in the hands of third-party developers.

SLOW-PCfighter has $19 written on the price tag and for testing purposes it comes as a demo, allowing the user to scan the system and view all detected errors and correct only 25 of them. Considering other paid products on the market, SPAMfighter's registry cleaner is quite affordable.

It does not happen too often to see a company specialized primarily in protecting your inbox from unwanted emails create a system maintenance instrument. SPAMfighter has recently released SLOW-PCfighter, a product designed to rid the registry of invalid entries and make your system run faster and generate less errors.



Provided that Windows registry is the core of the entire system, improper tampering with the data in there could lead to serious damages and even the re-install of the operating system. In the case of SLOW-PCfighter, users of any caliber can safely play around and experiment the different options available.

A nicely drawn interface awaits with clearly separated menus that can't possibly pose any sort of trouble to the users. All menus are organized vertically in the left-hand side of the application window. The first on the list is the Overview section, which briefs them on the current state of the system and lets them initiate a new scan. Its purpose is also to show the user the number of errors it detected and how many of them were fixed.

Scanning the PC does not take long, but it is not the fastest procedure either. The application is bent on eliminating invalid COM/ActiveX entries, uninstalling leftovers, font entries, ineffectual references to application paths, Windows startup items, otiose program shortcuts, empty registry keys, no longer valid file associations, shared DLLs that are no longer needed, shared folders, invalid class keys, and more.

SLOW-PCfighter is flexible enough to let you choose which of these sections should be scanned. This way, you can avoid losing time over areas that generally do not accumulate too much junk that strongly affects computer performance. Thus, you can focus instead on the regions that constantly amass invalids impacting on the overall performance of the computer.



Before proceeding to cleaning the crapware detected in the registry, the application will throw a safety net by creating a backup, which you can quickly restore should something happen to hit the fan because of eliminating a vital false positive. The time it takes for the backup to be created is not much, but it always depends on the amount of data to store.

Sure that multple backups can be created and for each of them you get details such as date and time. Unfortunately, these cannot be renamed, not even after they have been stored. Also, you cannot pick a different location to save them than the default one under Program Data. Reverting the registry to a previous state takes less than a blink of an eye. The size of the file to restore plays an important role, but keeping the registry clean all the time will not cause the app to create large backups.

During our testing, the application showed the highest number of invalid entries, out of the three additional registry cleaners we compared it to. It also let us know that all of them were fixed from the first repair session. However, a second scan showed that there were still items to be eliminated and we proceeded to doing that. The third time, even if the erroneous entries were in a much smaller number, they were still present. It would have been okay if these were all entries that were created by running programs, but in our case the majority of them were valid invalids that needed to be eliminated.

Configuring the software to work your way is no fancy business, as all options are easy to understand and there is nothing complicated. You get to enable the app to run on system startup (although I would not recommend this, because the OS loading will take longer), skip the introductory splash screen, keep the app minimized during scanning, enable automatic error repairing and backup creation.



But there is also the possibility to create an ignore list that should consist of elements that revive as soon as you delete them or false positives (items the application picks up as invalid, although they are still needed). These files can also be picked from the post-scan list of returned errors.

Because the registry is such a sensitive area, SLOW-PCfighter logs all the changes. These are simple text files that record every finding of the application. This way, you can see which entries have been removed and the time.

Scan tasks can be scheduled at any time you want. The instrument has all the flexibility you need to program registry checks any time and day you want, with whatever frequency and for as long a period of time as you want. Moreover, multiple schedules can be set up with the same ease.

The Utilities is the last menu in SLOW-PCfighter and, contrary to our expectations that envisioned tools such as process manager, duplicate finder, PC cleanup and even a defragmenter, the application makes available just a startup manager. Although a startup manager and a registry cleaner do not live up to the name of the software, the application is at the beginning of the road and in the Utilities menu one can clearly see that there is plenty of room for more instruments.

The Good

Everything is simple enough for every user, regardless of his/her computer skills, to find each of the options present without any difficulty. The well-structured interface does not leave any room for confusion.

The registry cleaner does a good job with nailing the errors and eliminating them for the stability of the system. Backup options intervene automatically by default, saving the data before deleting it.

The Bad

We needed more than one cleaning session in order to obviate the invalid entries in the registry. The application is at the beginning of the road and lacks certain instruments for keeping the PC as performant as possible. But, hopefully, these will be added along the way.

The Truth

It's $19 and does a good job with the registry. We did not encounter any trouble in this regard and the system indeed felt better after SLOW-PCfighter’s intervention. It definitely lacks some tools to live up to its name, but it'll get there.

For the current version, the app makes for a good companion if you're looking to clean the registry of more than just the typical handful of junk entries.