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#1
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Win7 Registry Size
I recently noticed just how much left-over rubbish there is in my
system's registry. It's 6 years old, never cleanly reinstalled, never treated with snake-oil. I'm not aware of any problem with it; no slow-down detected. I used regedit, exported it, checked file size and it's 273 MB. How does this compare with other users? I'd like to know. Ed |
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#2
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Win7 Registry Size
On 12/4/2017 1:17 PM, Ed Cryer wrote:
I recently noticed just how much left-over rubbish there is in my system's registry. It's 6 years old, never cleanly reinstalled, never treated with snake-oil. I'm not aware of any problem with it; no slow-down detected. I used regedit, exported it, checked file size and it's 273 MB. How does this compare with other users? I'd like to know. Ed I ran a powershell script and it reported 153 MB. w7 ult x64, been running alittle over a year, Office, Photoshop, Visual Studio, several browsers. I've cleaned it with ccleaner maybe half a dozen times. $data=Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_Registry -ErrorAction Stop #Format the results and write an object to the pipeline $data | Select-Object -Property @{Name="Computername";Expression={$_.__SERVER}}, Status, @{Name="Current Size (Mb)";Expression={$_.CurrentSize}}, @{Name="Max Size (Mb)";Expression={$_.MaximumSize}}, @{Name="Free Size (Mb)";Expression={$_.MaximumSize - $_.CurrentSize}}, @{Name="Percent Free (%)";Expression={ (1 - ($_.CurrentSize/$_.MaximumSize))*100 }}, @{Name="Created";Expression={$_.ConvertToDateTime( $_.InstallDate)}}, @{Name="Age";Expression={(Get-Date) - ( $_.ConvertToDateTime($_.InstallDate)) }} https://superuser.com/questions/3742...ze-of-registry |
#3
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Win7 Registry Size
Mike S wrote:
On 12/4/2017 1:17 PM, Ed Cryer wrote: I recently noticed just how much left-over rubbish there is in my system's registry. It's 6 years old, never cleanly reinstalled, never treated with snake-oil. I'm not aware of any problem with it; no slow-down detected. I used regedit, exported it, checked file size and it's 273 MB. How does this compare with other users? I'd like to know. Ed I ran a powershell script and it reported 153 MB. w7 ult x64, been running alittle over a year, Office, Photoshop, Visual Studio, several browsers. I've cleaned it with ccleaner maybe half a dozen times. $data=Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_Registry -ErrorAction Stop #Format the results and write an object to the pipeline $data | Select-Object -Property @{Name="Computername";Expression={$_.__SERVER}}, Status, @{Name="Current Size (Mb)";Expression={$_.CurrentSize}}, @{Name="Max Size (Mb)";Expression={$_.MaximumSize}}, @{Name="Free Size (Mb)";Expression={$_.MaximumSize - $_.CurrentSize}}, @{Name="Percent Free (%)";Expression={ (1 - ($_.CurrentSize/$_.MaximumSize))*100 }}, @{Name="Created";Expression={$_.ConvertToDateTime( $_.InstallDate)}}, @{Name="Age";Expression={(Get-Date) - ( $_.ConvertToDateTime($_.InstallDate)) }} https://superuser.com/questions/3742...ze-of-registry Interesting. I ran Ccleaner, checked with regedit's export again, and got 270MB. Then I ran your script and got this; Current Size (Mb) : 200 Max Size (Mb) : 2048 Free Size (Mb) : 1848 Percent Free (%) : 90.234375 Created : 23/11/2011 15:05:46 Age : 2203.06:34:40.5049752 That's not much above your size after one year. I wonder which method is giving the true size. Ed |
#4
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Win7 Registry Size
Ed Cryer wrote:
Mike S wrote: On 12/4/2017 1:17 PM, Ed Cryer wrote: I recently noticed just how much left-over rubbish there is in my system's registry. It's 6 years old, never cleanly reinstalled, never treated with snake-oil. I'm not aware of any problem with it; no slow-down detected. I used regedit, exported it, checked file size and it's 273 MB. How does this compare with other users? I'd like to know. Ed I ran a powershell script and it reported 153 MB. w7 ult x64, been running alittle over a year, Office, Photoshop, Visual Studio, several browsers. I've cleaned it with ccleaner maybe half a dozen times. $data=Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_Registry -ErrorAction Stop #Format the results and write an object to the pipeline $data | Select-Object -Property @{Name="Computername";Expression={$_.__SERVER}}, Status, @{Name="Current Size (Mb)";Expression={$_.CurrentSize}}, @{Name="Max Size (Mb)";Expression={$_.MaximumSize}}, @{Name="Free Size (Mb)";Expression={$_.MaximumSize - $_.CurrentSize}}, @{Name="Percent Free (%)";Expression={ (1 - ($_.CurrentSize/$_.MaximumSize))*100 }}, @{Name="Created";Expression={$_.ConvertToDateTime( $_.InstallDate)}}, @{Name="Age";Expression={(Get-Date) - ( $_.ConvertToDateTime($_.InstallDate)) }} https://superuser.com/questions/3742...ze-of-registry Interesting. I ran Ccleaner, checked with regedit's export again, and got 270MB. Then I ran your script and got this; Current Size (Mb) : 200 Max Size (Mb) : 2048 Free Size (Mb) : 1848 Percent Free (%) : 90.234375 Created : 23/11/2011 15:05:46 Age : 2203.06:34:40.5049752 That's not much above your size after one year. I wonder which method is giving the true size. Ed They're just files in the file system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Registry File Locations -------------- ...The location for system registry files in Windows NT is %SystemRoot%\System32\Config; the user-specific HKEY_CURRENT_USER user registry hive is stored in Ntuser.dat inside the user profile. Windows NT ---------- Sam – HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SAM Security – HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SECURITY Software – HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE \___ largest files... System – HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM / Default – HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT (Userdiff – Not associated with a hive) %USERPROFILE%\Ntuser.dat - HKEY_CURRENT_USER Usrclass.dat - HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes The later OSes seem to have a few additional files implying journaling. This is an attempt to make it harder to damage the files (due to, say, a dirty shutdown). So if you don't need information to the nearest byte, about the logical size of the registry, glancing at the files themselves will give you some idea. In the ones I was just looking at, there wasn't much there. I guess I'm not adventurous enough, as I don't think I've ever seen a registry set that was out of control. Maybe a SOFTWARE file that was 25MB or so. Which is nothing, compared to what other people have got. ******* And another set of registry files is located in C:\WINDOWS\repair. Those are "empty" files, and are only good enough for tipping an OS upright again. They don't have all your settings, so they're not intended for any long term usage. You use a restore point, to replace those when the system finally boots. Paul |
#5
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Win7 Registry Size
On Mon, 4 Dec 2017 21:17:57 +0000, Ed Cryer
wrote: I recently noticed just how much left-over rubbish there is in my system's registry. It's 6 years old, never cleanly reinstalled, never treated with snake-oil. I'm not aware of any problem with it; no slow-down detected. I used regedit, exported it, checked file size and it's 273 MB. How does this compare with other users? I'd like to know. Because access to the registry is random, that left-over rubbish doesn't really hurt you. 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. |
#6
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Win7 Registry Size
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.) -- J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf Life, liberty and the happiness of pursuit! |
#7
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Win7 Registry Size
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 |
#8
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Win7 Registry Size
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 |
#9
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Win7 Registry Size
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 |
#10
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Win7 Registry Size
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 |
#11
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Win7 Registry Size
"Rene Lamontagne" wrote
| I exported the registry to a blank folder and checked it's size it was | 377 MB. As Paul said, the Registry is files. If you export to .reg files you're creating a text-based record that can be used to import that data again. It won't be the same size because it's a text file and the Registry is a database. In other words, what you export is comparable to a CSV file. Also, Registry cleaners usually focus on a few things. Most notably entries under HKCR for COM libraries that may be gone. There may also be entries for uninstalled software. But those entries are a tiny portion of the total Registry. They're harmless. And in some cases they may be useful: If you decide to reinstall a program later you might be glad your settings are still there. Sysinternals used to have a program to defrag the Registry. I don't know if it still exists or whether such a task would still be useful, but it seems a defrag would make more sense than just removing a handful of entries. |
#12
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Win7 Registry Size (Win 10)
On 12/05/2017 9:11 AM, Mayayana wrote:
"Rene Lamontagne" wrote | I exported the registry to a blank folder and checked it's size it was | 377 MB. As Paul said, the Registry is files. If you export to .reg files you're creating a text-based record that can be used to import that data again. It won't be the same size because it's a text file and the Registry is a database. In other words, what you export is comparable to a CSV file. Also, Registry cleaners usually focus on a few things. Most notably entries under HKCR for COM libraries that may be gone. There may also be entries for uninstalled software. But those entries are a tiny portion of the total Registry. They're harmless. And in some cases they may be useful: If you decide to reinstall a program later you might be glad your settings are still there. Sysinternals used to have a program to defrag the Registry. I don't know if it still exists or whether such a task would still be useful, but it seems a defrag would make more sense than just removing a handful of entries. Yikes! after reading Pauls post just for laughs after reading a few posts in the NGs and playing an hour or so of a Half-Life 2 mod I decided to see if the registry had changed so I exported it and checked its size. IT now reads 618 MBs!!!! This gets weirder all the time, I will check it later again today and report, this seems impossible. Rene |
#13
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Win7 Registry Size (Win 10)
On 12/05/2017 9:33 AM, Rene Lamontagne wrote:
On 12/05/2017 9:11 AM, Mayayana wrote: "Rene Lamontagne" wrote | I exported the registry to a blank folder and checked it's size it was | 377 MB. Â*Â* As Paul said, the Registry is files. If you export to .reg files you're creating a text-based record that can be used to import that data again. It won't be the same size because it's a text file and the Registry is a database. In other words, what you export is comparable to a CSV file. Â*Â*Â* Also, Registry cleaners usually focus on a few things. Most notably entries under HKCR for COM libraries that may be gone. There may also be entries for uninstalled software. But those entries are a tiny portion of the total Registry. They're harmless. And in some cases they may be useful: If you decide to reinstall a program later you might be glad your settings are still there. Â*Â* Sysinternals used to have a program to defrag the Registry. I don't know if it still exists or whether such a task would still be useful, but it seems a defrag would make more sense than just removing a handful of entries. Yikes! after reading Pauls postÂ* just for laughs after reading a few posts in the NGs and playing an hour or so of a Half-Life 2 mod I decided to see if the registry had changed so I exported it and checked its size. IT now reads 618 MBs!!!! This gets weirder all the time, I will check it later again today and report, this seems impossible. Rene Curiouser and Curiouser (Did Alice or the Rabbit say that?) :-) Checked again, now back to 384 MBs. Rene |
#14
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Win7 Registry Size (Win 10)
On 12/05/2017 11:23 AM, Paul wrote:
Rene Lamontagne wrote: On 12/05/2017 9:33 AM, Rene Lamontagne wrote: On 12/05/2017 9:11 AM, Mayayana wrote: "Rene Lamontagne" wrote | I exported the registry to a blank folder and checked it's size it was | 377 MB. Â*Â* As Paul said, the Registry is files. If you export to .reg files you're creating a text-based record that can be used to import that data again. It won't be the same size because it's a text file and the Registry is a database. In other words, what you export is comparable to a CSV file. Â*Â*Â* Also, Registry cleaners usually focus on a few things. Most notably entries under HKCR for COM libraries that may be gone. There may also be entries for uninstalled software. But those entries are a tiny portion of the total Registry. They're harmless. And in some cases they may be useful: If you decide to reinstall a program later you might be glad your settings are still there. Â*Â* Sysinternals used to have a program to defrag the Registry. I don't know if it still exists or whether such a task would still be useful, but it seems a defrag would make more sense than just removing a handful of entries. Yikes! after reading Pauls postÂ* just for laughs after reading a few posts in the NGs and playing an hour or so of a Half-Life 2 mod I decided to see if the registry had changed so I exported it and checked its size. IT now reads 618 MBs!!!! This gets weirder all the time, I will check it later again today and report, this seems impossible. Rene Curiouser and Curiouser (Did Alice or the Rabbit say that?) :-) Checked again, now back to 384 MBs. Rene It's haunted. Have we had Halloween already ? Â*Â* Paul I think Ccleaner is misbehaving and lying to me. Just to further the experiment I plugged in and booted a spare SSD with a fairly pristine copy of Windows 10 with only 3 programs installed, Ccleaner, Minitool Partition wizard and Macrium Reflect. The registry on it reads 264 MBs, which sounds reasonable. Now, back to my Half-life 2 game Mod called Downfall. :-) Rene |
#15
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Win7 Registry Size (Win 10)
Rene Lamontagne wrote:
On 12/05/2017 9:33 AM, Rene Lamontagne wrote: On 12/05/2017 9:11 AM, Mayayana wrote: "Rene Lamontagne" wrote | I exported the registry to a blank folder and checked it's size it was | 377 MB. As Paul said, the Registry is files. If you export to .reg files you're creating a text-based record that can be used to import that data again. It won't be the same size because it's a text file and the Registry is a database. In other words, what you export is comparable to a CSV file. Also, Registry cleaners usually focus on a few things. Most notably entries under HKCR for COM libraries that may be gone. There may also be entries for uninstalled software. But those entries are a tiny portion of the total Registry. They're harmless. And in some cases they may be useful: If you decide to reinstall a program later you might be glad your settings are still there. Sysinternals used to have a program to defrag the Registry. I don't know if it still exists or whether such a task would still be useful, but it seems a defrag would make more sense than just removing a handful of entries. Yikes! after reading Pauls post just for laughs after reading a few posts in the NGs and playing an hour or so of a Half-Life 2 mod I decided to see if the registry had changed so I exported it and checked its size. IT now reads 618 MBs!!!! This gets weirder all the time, I will check it later again today and report, this seems impossible. Rene Curiouser and Curiouser (Did Alice or the Rabbit say that?) :-) Checked again, now back to 384 MBs. Rene It's haunted. Have we had Halloween already ? Paul |
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