Dell inspiron 1501 laptop registry problems

[deezers2010]

I have a dell laptop inspiron 1501 laptop with registry probems and its slow. I had stop sign firewall and i guess it got corrupted and stop working properly. I got another program that removed two trojans. I have a registry cleaner and everday it cleans up anywhere from 4-20 registry problems a day.

Anyone have any ideas? My mom had the same problem and the geek squad had to restore to factory settings, which fixed it.
Do i need to do the same thing? if so, how do you do it on my laptop, i've tried it and cant seem to find it. I do have the discs for it.

[gurukid22]

Windows is very bad at managing the registry and over time it gets very messy especially when installing and uninstalling programs. You can get resgistry cleaners but im not a big fan and never recommend it.

Yes, the best way to surely fix all problems is to format and reinstall or return to factory setting i would do this.

Backup your data first with dmailer backup.

And in newer verison of windows like vista and seven they do handle the registry a bit better so it may be a good idea to upgrade at the same time.

[mjdodd]

many laptops have a fa

[mjdodd]

oops to continue have a function key to do a rest at boot up. Others have a smallhole often underneath and in some cases a the back. insert a small objec tlike the end of a paper clip and there is a microswitch that willreset to factory settings.
Another route is to completely wipe the hard disk (using a disk eraser or a linux and reformat and then reformat back to windows on installation).
It is also worth noting that registry errors anything up to about 200 or so will have little effect on the computer speed. once you get to about 500 errors then you notice slow down. It would seem to me that the slowness may be due to other causes check
1 What is running in the background
2 is the hard disk needing defragmentation
3 Have you got a lot of gash / temporary files that need deleteing
4 is the hard disk too full
5 If the virtual memory file pinching too much (or worse too little space)
6 make sure you do not have any programs continually trying to access the internet see above
background

some AV progs also hog the machine and some progs use a lot of CPU cycles to do very little and hence slow it down. check the CPU cycle usage (event monitor in win XP and above)
M

[deezers2010]

Thanks so much for the extra info everyone. Here is an update. I did get a registry cleaner and when it finally finished cleaning up, it cleaned up over 700 reg errors. So I do have that. I do use clean disk alot and defrag.. I have Windows vista, but Im not a big fan of it.
I did try to reset to factory settings, it came back with "failed to nobulate media back to factory settings". which apparently is a dell thing.

so ok what does that mean and what can i do? or should i take it to someone?

thanks again!

[mjdodd]

if you have cleaned up over 700 reg errors then hte ,machine should be rnning rather better. You give no further info on what is / is not happening and so diagnosis at a distance is difficult.
let us know what the probs still are.
M