Detecting the Ever-growing Registry

The registry is a special set of files on your hard drive that contain all of the settings for applications, Windows, hardware, security, and you personally. It’s really a kind of database. As such, the registry stores a lot of information and it can be very tough to make much sense out of the entries until you know what’s going on. The Registry Editor, RegEdit.EXE, is a hidden file that can show you the content of the registry. Figure 2.7 shows a typical Registry Editor view. Generally, you don’t want to work with the Registry Editor until you know how Windows works and then only in very specific ways. Chapter 6 shows how to work with the registry.

Fortunately, you don’t have to open a copy of the Registry Editor to look for a dirty registry. To see how much space the registry currently consumes, right-click My Computer and choose Properties from the context menu. When you see the System Properties dialog box, select the Advanced tab. Click Settings in the Performance section. Click Change in the Virtual Memory section of the Performance options dialog box. The current registry size appears at the bottom of the Virtual Memory dialog box. A value of 40 to 55MB is normal for any registry. When the registry begins to exceed this value, you’ll want to add it to your list of things to optimize.

You might also want to use a utility provided by Microsoft called DuReg.EXE (http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/techinfo/reskit/tools/existing/dureg-o.asp). This command line utility displays registry statistics in an easy to understand manner. In addition, you can use it to check specific registry sections to determine when a particular section is causing problems. For example, on a particular machine a user might have installed a number of applications and now that user’s settings are filling the registry with data. If the settings remain behind after the user uninstalls the application, you can remove them using any of a number of registry tools. Figure 2.8 shows typical output from the DuReg utility.

FIGURE 2.7 Careful use of the Registry Editor can help keep your system in shape.

FIGURE 2.8 Microsoft provides the DuReg utility to obtain a precise registry size.

To obtain the complete registry statistics shown in Figure 2.8, type DuReg /A at the command prompt and press Enter. The check takes a while — up to 5 minutes, so don’t worry if you don’t see something immediately. The output is in bytes, so this registry has 45MB of data in it. You can also use this utility to check for a specific user or even a specific string in the registry. For example, you might want to know how much memory entries with the word Microsoft consume, so you could type DuReg /S “Microsoft” and DuReg would find them for you.