There may come a time in your life when you need to delete a key from your Windows Registry. Often, this is done in order to uninstall a program completely from your computer, but deleting a key can also remove viruses, malware, and a number of miscellaneous PC errors.
-For all of those reasons, learning how to delete a registry key is important. Here’s how you do it:
-Go to your Start menu. If you’re using Windows 7, search for an application called regedit
-If you’re using a previous version of Windows, open a ‘Run’ box and type in regedit
-Press enter
-This will open the Windows Registry
-Navigate to the key that you need to edit. This can be done using the default ‘Explorer’ view on the left-hand side. Or, if you know the name of the registry entry you’re looking for, you can simply search for it by pressing F3.
-Once you have found the key you need to change, you can edit it or delete it. Since this is a lesson on how to delete a registry key, simply press right click, hit ‘Delete’, and then select ‘Yes’.
-Make sure your PC doesn’t explode (we’re kidding)
A warning
Deleting keys in your registry can be a dangerous process. Programs depend on the registry in order to work properly, and removing one of these keys can have harmful effects on your PC’s performance. You may want to use a registry cleaner to delete old registry entries for you – safely and effectively.
Nevertheless, if the program no longer exists on your PC, and you simply want to uninstall it completely, then deleting the proper registry entry won’t harm your computer in any way, shape or form. In fact, cleaning the registry is one of the best ways to squeeze every ounce of performance out of your PC, especially if you already run other optimization programs and tools on a regular basis.