How to find out the Registry size ?

[Dave C.]

If it's not caused by Registry "gunk", then what is your
opinion on what causes the sluggishness?

Good advice. I just removed some unwanted entries from the registry, and
resulted in my system not being abot to boot AT ALL....just froze in the
blue welcome screen. Could not get at restore, safe mode, and of course
ERUNDT registry backup. Fortunately, I had a full accurate bootable clone
of my master drive which saved the day for me. I won't do that again.

What happened, is that I uninstalled Google desktomsearch, scanned registry
for occurrances of that, and deleted them. That did it!

Dave C.

 

[JCO]

I checked my registry size, ran the cleaner and checked it again.
My Registry went from 31mb to 35mb
One of the best programs that I've used is called RegSeeker.
You can get it free at download.com or Google it.

 

[Enkidu]

That's a bit over-scary isn't it ?

No.

Cheers,

Cliff

 

[Ramesh, MS-MVP]

The Registry cleaner that I was considering using was NTREGOPT.

NTREGOPT is not a registry cleaner as it does nothing to the data. Here is
an excerpt from the author's page:
http://www.larshederer.homepage.t-online.de/erunt/ntregopt.txt

[copy]

Note that the program does NOT change the contents of the registry in
any way, nor does it physically defrag the registry files on the drive
(as the PageDefrag program from SysInternals does). The optimization
done by NTREGOPT is simply compacting the registry hives to the
minimum size possible.

[/copy]

I use this program regularly and face no problems absolutely. BTW, this is a
program from the same author who created ERUNT.

ERUNT and NTREGOPT:
http://www.larshederer.homepage.t-online.de/erunt/

--
Regards,

Ramesh Srinivasan, Microsoft MVP [Windows XP Shell/User]
Windows® XP Troubleshooting http://www.winhelponline.com

... I would advise you to be very careful about using a registry cleaner.
There have been several posts here about people having problems
after using registry cleaners.
Be sure to back up your registry first.

The Registry cleaner that I was considering using was NTREGOPT.
Have people had problems with that one?

And how exactly do you back up the Registry?
In order to restore a damaged Registry,
you'll have to successfully boot-up your system.
But you can't sucessfully boot-up your system
if your Registry is damaged, can you?
Isn't that somewhat of a Catch-22?

 

[Mark Dormer]

That feature has been removed from Windows XP and windows 2003
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/292726

Regards
Mark Dormer

 

[JCO]

That would make sense as to why so many folks are talking about it on this
post.
I never checked my XP machine. I like my W2K OS better but I use both.
Thanks

 

[R. McCarty]

Registry size ( on disk ) is the combination of the following files
from C:\Windows\System32\Config
1.) Default
2.) SAM
3.) Security
4.) Software
5.) System
On my own system the Registry size is just over 21.5 Megabytes.
Out of the ~400,000 Keys the last time I let RegSeeker count up
the errant keys, the total was a whopping 34 keys.

 

[Paul Knudsen]

I'm about to try one of those Registry cleaners that are supposed to
eliminate obsolete entries in the Registry (which, I'm told, is one
of the causes of sluggishness).

I just thought, out of curiosity, that I'd first see how much space
the Registry currently occupies, and then check it again after using
the cleaner.

Is there a feature in Windows XP Pro that tells you the Registry size,
or is there a free program that does that ?

The registry is just a file--actually several files. They call them
"Hives" for some reason. I don't recall all the names--"Software"
(with no extension) is one, and probably the biggest. Look in:
C:\WINDOWS\system32\config. In Explorer you'll need to set it to show
hidden and system files. Here's my result:

C:\>dir software /s
Volume in drive C has no label.
Volume Serial Number is 1422-AF39

....

Directory of C:\WINDOWS\system32\config

03/16/2006 11:49 PM 19,136,512 software
1 File(s) 19,136,512 bytes

 

[jacaranda]

My advice is *not* to do this. You've been told wrong; it's hardly
ever the cause of sluggishness.

I've found that for me, sluggishness is either a sign that I need to
defrag, or my hard disk is too full.

To the OP, you might want to explore these possibilities first.

 

[Martin]

The Registry cleaner that I was considering using was NTREGOPT.
Have people had problems with that one?

And how exactly do you back up the Registry?
In order to restore a damaged Registry,
you'll have to successfully boot-up your system.
But you can't sucessfully boot-up your system
if your Registry is damaged, can you?
Isn't that somewhat of a Catch-22?

If you run NTREGOPT then you'll see that once it's completed it's 'regopt'
it'll ask you if you want to reboot pc.
The same dialog box also tells you the original and new registry sizes and %
space saved with new registry.

Martin.

 

[Darrell S]

You should be able to click on Start.... Run..... Regedit... and click on
File... Export. This will set up to export a copy of your registry. Save
it somewhere you can find again. (Like your Desktop) Go there, right click
it, choose Properties. That should show you the size of your registry.

 

[JCO]

I agree with you.
The perfect tool would let you back up your Registry and provide a method to
boot in DOS to restore the Registry.

I don't know of anything will let you do your restore in DOS.
That would be nice.

 

[Al Klein]

You should be able to click on Start.... Run..... Regedit... and click on
File... Export. This will set up to export a copy of your registry. Save
it somewhere you can find again. (Like your Desktop) Go there, right click
it, choose Properties. That should show you the size of your registry.

The size of an export registry file. As far as the size of the actual
registry? That depends on exactly what "Registry size" means to the
OP.

 

[VManes]

You should be able to click on Start.... Run..... Regedit... and click on
File... Export. This will set up to export a copy of your registry.
Save
it somewhere you can find again. (Like your Desktop) Go there, right
click
it, choose Properties. That should show you the size of your registry.

The size of an export registry file. As far as the size of the actual
registry? That depends on exactly what "Registry size" means to the
OP.

~~~~~~~~~~~~
There do seem to be various definitions of "registry size".
On my system, dureg.exe reports total size of about 75MB. The exported file
of the whole registry is 127MB.

Examining the stored file in a hex viewer, it appears to be a plain text
file, stored in 2-byte characters (second byte 00) and with significant
amount of spaces padding some entries.

Val

 

[Al Klein]

There do seem to be various definitions of "registry size".
On my system, dureg.exe reports total size of about 75MB. The exported file
of the whole registry is 127MB.

And the files that compose the registry add up to a different size.
And the registry structure in memory are a different size.

Examining the stored file in a hex viewer, it appears to be a plain text
file, stored in 2-byte characters (second byte 00) and with significant
amount of spaces padding some entries.

It's a plain text file, using Unicode characters. Open it in Notepad.