Rene Lamontagne wrote:
On 12/05/2017 7:04 AM, Ed Cryer wrote:
Rene Lamontagne wrote:
On 12/04/2017 6:45 PM, J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
In message , Ken Blake
writes:
[]
Also note that in these days of a 1TB drive costing $50 US or so,
273MB is a tiny amount. It's a little more than a penny's worth of
disk space.

But 5 or 10 per cent of the available RAM on smaller systems, so
(since the registry is normally held in RAM), can be relevant in
that respect. (Though there's little you can _do_ about it -
certainly a pass with a "registry cleaner" won't make much
difference to the size, and what it does delete will often come back
rapidly, consisting as it does largely of MRU entries.)

Well you fellows got my curiosity up about registry cleaners.
I have never used one, So having a 1 day old Macrium backup I decided
to have a look.

I exported the registry to a blank folder and checked it's size it
was 377 MB.
Ran Ccleaner registry cleaner and it took 4 passes before it reported
no errors'
Exported it again and found the new clean size to be(drum roll) 383 MB!
So much for snake oil registry cleaners for me, It proved my point
beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Case Closed.

Rene


Maybe Ccleaner has done you a favour. I've never seen it do multiple
passes, and I'd guess it was repairing something that might have been
about to crash your system. 6MB added to shore up a shaky wall.

Ed

I dunno Ed, I have never used a registry cleaner and this was just an
experiment to see what happened but I always assumed they were supposed
to remove overburden.
This system has always been quick and smart and using this registry
cleaner doesn't seemed to have hurt or helped it any, I'm just very
surprised that it added instead of subtracting.

Rene


They make registry parsers.

https://github.com/EricZimmerman/Registry

And something to note, for the longest while (years!), I didn't
know what the registry was considered. Is it a database ? Or
is it a file system ? Someone finally declared it a file system.
And in that example, you can see the registry (for some reason)
supports the notion of "deleted objects". Just like a regular
file system flips a single $MFT byte to delete a file, without
actually cleaning up after it. I would have expected the registry
to be "compacted" at each shutdown or startup, to remove something
like that.

Which makes it all the more puzzling as to why your registry
file did not shrink. If a registry cleaner can "compact" the
file, it should shrink.

Now, can a registry have links ? I think it can. If you don't
handle a link properly, you could end up making two identical
copies of information. And that would be a potential example
of a way to expand the thing.

The registry can contain arbitrary objects. It can contain
binary blobs. You could store whole "regular files" in it,
if you wanted.

So all it really amounts to, is an "obfuscated file system".

The registry entries even have permissions, and you know
how pesky things owned by TrustedInstaller are. Maybe the
admin account cannot remove or alter them. How does a
registry cleaner deal with that ? Does it have the
appropriate token to deal with everything with permission
issues ?

Paul