I recently realized my windows XP computer has this huge thing called "The Registry". So, I ran regedit.exe to take a look, and sure as hell there's X+1 billion files in there, and it checks EVERY ONE whenever I try to boot the computer, and it has to go through this huge list to look for any kind of important information (like how to run headphones). Anyway, when I was taking a look I deleted four (yes, only 4) files with harmless-looking names. Now sound doesn't work on my computer at all.
So, I thought I'd be the mature, adult-minded, responsible, computer-oriented person I usually am and try to find a program on teh inturtoobz to fix my registry for me. Preferably a free one, since 29.95 is a bit much to spend on deleting four no-name files.
The problem? All of these freaking registry-cleaning programs that google spits up when I search "clean windows registry free" (without quotes) aren't actually free. Sure they'll SCAN the computer for free, and then proceed to tell that yes I do indeed have a problem and thusly I need to pay $30 for a disk in a box, just so that I can read the number printed on the box and paste it into the program so it'll actually fix my computer for me.
So. Aside from using FDisk and completely obliterating everything on my computer, is there some way to clean up my windows registry for free FOR REAL, and make my computer make noise and boot quickly again?