system draging

I'm using a HP pavilion with a 1.8Ghz P4 and 512 MB of ram. When I first started using It, it flew along, but now, about a year later, as I've added and deleted many junk programs, It's going very slow. I heard it could be because my registry could be cluttered full of junk. I did a full restore on another pc in this condition, and it seemed to fix it. I don't really want to do that on my current machine because I recently upgraded xp home to pro and i don't want to reinstall it. My question is, is there anyway to clean up the registry without restoring the PC? Thank you.

 

If you're using NTFS filesystem, you may want to download the free version of Diskkeeper and try a better defrag than the stock one in XP. If you happened to have converted FAT32 to NTFS with the utility that Microsoft provides, that will really slow down the disk access, since it defaults to 512 byte clusters, which adds a lot of overhead. As far as registry cleaning, I use Norton's WinDoctor, as well as a couple of manual registry cleaners. Finally, Systernals has a bunch of free utilities, and one of the handier ones for this issue is PageDefrag, which will allow you to defrag the registry and paging file, something that normal defrag runs don't do.