I had noticed that my Vista PC was being a bit slow to start and had frozen on my a few times, a bit of a pain if this freeze was in an online game! I had been searching for solutions in the usual places and one message that i kept getting was to tidy up my registry. Well, that is easier said than done. I may not be a numpty when it comes to computers, and whilst no techie wizard, I do know that messing with the registry is fraught with danger. Around this time Digeus offered me a trial of their Registry Cleaner product, the timing was just perfect.

The download is a snap and didn't take too long, it is around 1.2M in size, mind you I am on rather a fast broadband, but even so it was only around 7 seconds. In fact my virus scanner took longer to give the file the all clear. A quick double click of the downloaded file and it installed it self, asking the usual questions about where to store files, I just used the defaults. Interestingly it didn't auto start after the install had finished. Not difficult to find of course, it was in my program list.

When the program started the first option for me was to backup the registry, and then I let it lose to clean away. It scanned my registry and came up with over 700 broken, wrong or false items in just over 5 minutes of scanning. I spent about 30 minutes manually checking the entries and found nothing wrong with the claims of Digeus – all the ones I checked were indeed in need of repair.

You can only repair 5 entries at a time if you don't register, and registration costs are a discounted $17.99 at the moment, so is not a real pain for us. Once registered I clicked on the fix key, and away it went, fixed all my registry errors in about 2 seconds. So I closed down and restarted. It took a noticeable 20 per cent less time to boot in – that is quite impressive, and I know that if you have a PC that takes 30 minutes to start up, that is a significant saving, and depending on what your errors are, could be quicker than the 20% I got. It would probably have taken me several hours to find the errors that Digeus found, and my time is worth much more than a few $ - this product really saved me hassle. My PC loads quicker, and so far, a few hours later, I am not experiencing my usual sudden freeze just as I get a full house in online poker – now that is a real bonus. Pity it doesn't help me play better poker too.

All in all a very easy product to use and one of the more cost effective options options. It does exactly what it says on the tin, as someone else once said.