There are plenty of misconceptions surrounding how cleaning the registry affects performance, one of the most prominent being that it's important to reduce the registry size. Other good hygiene practices, such as removing bloatware, freeing disk storage space, and halting unused services are much more effective ways of improving your PC’s performance. Here’s the unexpected truth: You can absolutely get away with never managing the registry and see no performance effect on your PC.
After years of software installs (and uninstalls), hardware changes, and program upgrades, the registry can be littered with unused keys. Just as with any registry in real life, the Windows registry is susceptible to becoming cluttered if not maintained.
