The Windows registry works like an attic; stuff just keeps getting tossed in there, eventually creating a big, jumbled mess. Rick Cook explains why you need to pay attention to the registry and reviews types of registry tools for doing some spot cleaning.
Pane Relief: Registry Management Tools
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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… applications cleaned up after themselves when you uninstall or make changes?
first of all, shouldn’t the title be
PAIN RELIEF ?
and secondly, what i’d really like to see is an in-depth dive into the registry and how an every day user can use it to their gain
for example the article didn’t even mention the run once values in the registry, and those are important for two reasons
1. trojans shove their crap in their sometimes
2. you can remove unwanted processes from there
so for the record and those that don’t know
check the following sections of your registry for unwanted processes
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionRun
and
HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionRun
i give the article a 2 out of 10 for content.
there is so much more things to learn about the registry that this article doesn’t even attempt to cover sadly.
EDIT: osnews doesnt allow me to include ‘\’s here in the post but you guys know what i mean from the above don’t you ?
cheers
anyweb
Edited 2006-02-12 22:22
I like to see in depth articles about the registry also, but then you might as well look at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windows2000serv/reskit… .
It’s best for regular users to stay out of it completely and leave checking and cleaning the registry to the tools available, even for keys that seem simple to us like the ones you mention. The registry is too powerful and complex to mess with it, unless you do it on a test machine.
I appreciate this issue, but I always find it annoying that Windows depends so heavily on gui apps, like regedit.
The Cygwin environment includes ‘regtool.exe’, which allows you to list, add and delete keys and values from the command line. It’s great, except that in practice it’s awkward to use.
It’s been my idea for some time to create a command line tool that would let me search through the registry from the command line much like grep. And maybe it would let me make modifications based on the results.
Anyway, it’s still just an idea.
Its possible to achieve this with some VB scripting – create an object and go from there. It is messy though
MS has its own command line tools for the registry, like reg.exe, which comes from the resource kit if I remember correctly. We use that to check for entries and modify them through the login scripts for users. And regedit itself also has a few command line options so it doesn always run the gui version.
I expect that there will be more powerful tools coming with the final release of monad.
And regedit itself also has a few command line options so it doesn always run the gui version.
When I refer to the command-line, I’m usually using telnet to get from my Linux machine to my Windows machine (which runs a Cygwin telnetd server).
I don’t know if regedit would work that way, but even if it did, I would be scared that it would try to pop up a window and therefore hang the telnet session. That happens frequently when I try to run dual interface software. It’s inconvenient to switch the monitor to the Windows machine, thus the annoyance.
I know this thread is straying from its origin, but the article interested me specifically because I often have to deal with the registry and I have not yet found an ideal way to do that via my prefered interface–telnet.
People still use telnet?!
Just curious why you’re not using ssh.
I have an ethernet switch in my office, so I’m telneting across a segment of ethernet that is contained within the walls of my office. I use ssh from work to home, but telnet is simpler, so I use it when I control the route.
Sure they do: MS ships a telnet server, but not a SSH server.
Of course you can install openSSH yourself, but ISVs always refer to telnet when explaining how to do command line remote adminstration on their products (I’m thinking Cisco voice software here).
Was hoping the article would recommend a freeware/commercial registry cleaner, since there are so many of them its hard to choose the most effective one
My favourite is RegCleaner by Jouni Vuorio (4.3 is last free version). Its clean with a very straight forward tabbed interface. Undoing changes from the backup tab is easy. His homepage is http://www.jv16.com
I remember in Win 9x, running a registry cleaner like Norton Utilities was mandatory on a regular basis. Things seem to have improved substantially with Win 2k and XP. (Although I am fairly certain that the registry is involved with the fact that my XP box takes longer to shut down than it does to boot!)
Microsoft should have put a bit more thought into designing the OS and registry. First, they should have had two registries, one for the Windows OS and one for applications. Second, there should have been no way for applications and users to register a DLL in any Windows folder. If Microsoft really wanted a “central” location for DLLs then a special folder should have been created outside the Windows system.