registry bloat

[Eben]

two symptoms may be related:

1. my computer is responding very slowly (much more
slowly than when I first installed XP (upgrade to 98)

2. I occasionally do a registry export as a backup and
have noticed that what used to by 10 megs is now 68 megs
and growing.

any advice? (appreciate and email in addition to
posting)

 

[Willit]

Reg Export is not a good way to back up your registry.

Note: The "Export registry" function in Regedit is USELESS
(!) to make a complete backup of the registry. Neither
does it export the whole registry (for example, no
information from the "SECURITY" hive is saved), nor can
the exported file be used later to replace the current
registry with the old one. Instead, if you re-import the
file, it is merged with the current registry, leaving you
with an absolute mess of old and new registry keys."

http://home.t-online.de/home/lars.hederer/erunt/

 

[The Unknown P]

This view of the edit feature for the registry is a rather
simplistic one and not entirely true. While your method
would result in a merged entry no keys will be changed. In
other words it will overwrite the existing keys but any
keys you added will not be removed or altered. Anyone
going to this much trouble will know that all you have to
do to undo any registry changes made via the export\modify
method would simply have to delete the altered file and
then merge the original into the registry to undo any
changes. Therefore your reply is not entirely accurate.
Should any of the original sub keys have become corrupt
they are overwritten with the backup or exported copy. No
sub keys or values that were added after the export are
removed or altered. It is not a good practice to export a
sub key but rather the entire key(it will look like a
little folder in the left panel) should be exported.
Exporting is a good and viable method of testing registry
changes or alterations. You are correct in noting that
this is not a good method of backing up the entire
registry. Instead the NT Backup that comes with XP(for HE
it is found on your disk in the valueadd\msft\ntbackup
folder)should be used. Keep smiling.

 

[Eben]

Appreciate both your thoughts but neither of you
addresses my question. Is the registry getting
unreasonably huge and is this a cause of the XP
increasing slowness? Anyone?

 

[sli]

You are correct in noting that
this is not a good method of backing up the entire
registry. Instead the NT Backup that comes with XP(for HE
it is found on your disk in the valueadd\msft\ntbackup
folder)should be used. Keep smiling.

The utility ERUNT, mentioned by another poster, is better and simpler.
http://home.t-online.de/home/lars.hederer/erunt/

 

[Sharon F]

two symptoms may be related:

1. my computer is responding very slowly (much more
slowly than when I first installed XP (upgrade to 98)

2. I occasionally do a registry export as a backup and
have noticed that what used to by 10 megs is now 68 megs
and growing.

any advice? (appreciate and email in addition to
posting)

On my desktop running a 2 year old XP setup, a single registry backup
created with erunt (for system and current user only) is 48MB. When the
registry reached a certain size in Win95 and Win98, there was some
concern about its stability. That concern is not present in XP.

Also, would like to say that Registry Editor's export function is not
useful or effective as a full registry backup tool. Better choices: use
System Restore to create a restore point or use a third party tool such
as the erunt app that has already been mentioned in this thread.

 

[sli]

Appreciate both your thoughts but neither of you
addresses my question. Is the registry getting
unreasonably huge and is this a cause of the XP
increasing slowness? Anyone?

It's difficult for anyone to pinpoint the cause of a system's slowness from
a distance. If you think it's the registry, why not make a backup, using
ERUNT, from
http://home.t-online.de/home/lars.hederer/erunt/ then use one of the many
registry cleaners and see if it makes a difference. RegCleaner is one, from
http://www.pcmedixwebs.com/regclean.htm

 

[Alex Nichol]

Appreciate both your thoughts but neither of you
addresses my question. Is the registry getting
unreasonably huge and is this a cause of the XP
increasing slowness?

It is not out of the way. There may be some slack space in it, and what
I would do is get ERUNT from
http://home.t-online.de/home/lars.hederer/erunt
which includes NTREGOPT, run that to shake the slack out and use ERUNT
as a backup