reg display

I am working on an app to display a graphical representation of the registry. As a beginning, this would show, for each hive, the number of entries , their sizes and total size .
Can anyone help with this development or give me tips to similar efforts ?
Basically I am interested in how the 5 mega registry I have, is made up. I am pretty sure my/everyone's registry is bloated and inefficient with many redundant entries.
A graphical analysis would help cut out the rubbish by locating large or non-contiguous areas and also isolate the keys that just say
"I am the name of SW Manufacturer xxx "
that you can normally only delete manually
and which do not load or define parameters for a program.
regards

 

Not to throw a damp towel on the exercise, but isn't this the purpose of reg cleaners? To find and delete data that is no longer valid?

 

No

WhitPhil,
I am not only interested in what reg cleaners do or do not do.
I want to see the shape, size of hives, and their contents summarised in a way that will allow me to investigate areas the
cleaners just ignore.
Have made some progress with exporting keys to text files, doing some queries to create folders and then looking at the folders with Treesize or Diskmapper.
regards

 

the 5 mega registry I have,

Good Grief. That is small. Mine is around 7meg. But of course that includes all four files. System.dat alone is over 6meg.

If you have 80meg of RAM and a 20- 30gig HD 5-7meg is NOTHING.

I do not believe it is the size of the reg that slows the machine down at boot up.

I do not think a few extra bytes here and there mean that much either.

If speed is the concern then the size of the reg may be the wrong place to look.

You should be looking at what is told by the REG to ACTAULLY load.

The more stuff that loads the slower the boot up time will be.

The more stuff that is running in the background the overall slower things will be.

I think that if you want a faster bootup and overall faster operation these are the areas to work on rather than a few extra bytes in the reg.

with many redundant entries.

Yup. That there is. But I would be a little cautious of removing some of what may look like a redundant item. You may think you are removing a redundant entry but when you do you may be removing the other one also.

I have noticed that if I make a change to an entry early in the reg that change may already be reflected later on in the reg.

For Instance;

I do regedit find for My DOC ( notice no drive letter ). I change the first one found from C:\My Doc to D:\My Doc. The next one that appears may well be already changed.

BillyBob

 

I thought I would explain what I am wanting to look at ...

Look for "WhitPhil" on this page ... David's Page

(You can also have a good time there !)

regards

 

I was just referring to what you may think is an oversized Registry.

Also some cautions that might be taken when deciding what to remove or leave.

I also tried to point out that when you make a change in one place, it may be reflected some where else. You may know it and you may not.

The Windows Registry is not a place to just start removing things just because you ( or some reg cleaner ) think they may not be needed.

That much I have learned THE HARD WAY.

If I were to mess up today it would not be the first time I messed up Windows by doing same.

But of course I made VERY sure I had a backup first. Which Win98 does a good job of making. IF the user has not shut it down.

BillyBob

 

merlin:
I had a look at the graphic and I am not sure what do make of it, or how I would go about using a graphical picture of the registry.

Is it abnormal?? I have no idea. I would doubt that in a "normal" registry, there is any relationship between the percentage sizes of the various hives.

For example, a progam like RealPlayer installs a gazillion keys into HKCR, while any "normal" program would install a couple or maybe none.

BTW: Did you take into account the fact that
HKEY_Current_Config is just a reference pointer to HKLM\Config
and
HKEY_Classes_Root is just a reference pointer to HKLM\Software\Classes
and
HKEY_Current_User is just a reference pointer to HKEY\Users\.Default (if there is no login)

In general, a registry cleaners do a "decent" job of finding registry entries that point to non-existent files. And, in general these keys can be deleted.

Does it make the PC faster overall?? I'm not sure. It should speed up boot time, but after that I'm not sure what the affect is.

All of the accesses are done via a key (ie: the registry is not being searched sequentially looking for something). So whether there are 10 keys or 10000 keys under HKLM\Software, if there is a need to access the RUN key, for example, it should be a single read with the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run, and then an access to the fields within that key, such as "ScanRegistry ".

 

Thanks for the info WhitPhil.
Some things there I did not know.
I will continue this "hobby" of mine and post back ... maybe even with something useful ...

 

Hi Merlin

I like the idea. It is unique, I don't remember seeing anything doing this for the registry before.

There is some older virus I don't remember the name, that continually writes junk to the registry in an attempt to make it grow in size and drag down the system to a crawl then freeze.

I can see a use as a historical record so that refering back after a program install or some period in the future to see if it has grown in size outside of the expected. Coupled with other symptoms this could confirm something is amiss along with the other symptoms.

Could do something like just recording registy size, but in your pie you could see what area of the registry is spurting up.

I like!

Mike

 

Thanks for the kind words Mike - I am continuing to work on it.
At the moment, queries of sub-folders are causing problems.
Also, the automation of the whole process is a headache.
Help and suggestions very welcome.
regards