Does Vista keeps a log of changes made in the registry ?

If so, where can I find this log ?

 

no---there are always changes going on in the registry.Such a log would grow beyond the capacity of your harddrive. many of the changes are changes to the same keys over and over again.

Best you can do is use a registry snapshot program to do a before and after.

 

Windows creates restore points which also take up huge amount of space, why not for registry changes then ?

 

For the reason Jerry stated above.

 

You remind me of a little brother who follows his older brother around always asking questions and never accepting answers. You ask a lot of questions, but then always doubt everything and want to be spoon-fed the answers. I can appreciated your search for knowledge but you will never learn anything if you don't take a little initiative.

I gave you the why, but instead going out and testing it, you said "Why?" again.

Here's a little homework assignment.

Google "Process Monitor"

Download it. Read the help file so you understand it a little--you don't need to be an expert.

Load the program and set the filter to record REGISTRY READ/WRITE successes. READ SUCCESSES do not result in changes, but a READ/WRITE will often do so (not always, sometimes, it is just a read).

Start the CAPTURE sequence.

Start counting. Load a program. Load a second program. Close a program, close another, load another...Stop loading programs when you get to 10 seconds. That's TEN SECONDS only. STOP capturing events in process monitor.

Now, count the number of events (read changes) to the registry that occurred in TEN SECONDS.

I would tell you that in the experiment I just did, it recorded 1885 changes in TEN SECONDS, but you never believe anything anyone tells you until 30 people tell you (and you still refuse to do any work on your own).

Now, if 1885 changes occurred in 10 seconds, how many do you think occur in one day?

Save the event log. How large is it? In my case, about 1.3 mb.

10 seconds=1.3 mb.

Mileage will vary, but do you want to give up 1 mb of harddrive every 10 seconds to record what is basically the same registry keys getting changed over and over and over?

 

Gerry,


Brilliant !

That was the answer I was waiting for, some hard figures...

I like opinions from different people since there are a lot of so-called experts on forums (in case you haven't experienced this yet)


THANKS !

 

And, for Windows restore point works, Windows only stores/compress the changed bits of a file, So you cut down a lot on space consumption, at the cost to see these data as fragmented in some non-Vista/Win7 ready defragmentation programs, while they are not.

 

laptopaddict, how do you know, without doing the experiments yourself, that you have real validated numbers for registry activity. If you really want to delve into and understand the fine details of windows internals, YOU are going to have to develop some expertise in what to measure, how to measure, and most importantly, how to interpret the results.