As the tittle suggests what is the size normally?

I have an image of a clean install with SP1, without any drivers installed except the NIC. If I get to it (i've been busy lately) I will drop it an export to see how big it is on Monday.

The minute you install Vista you start making changes and installing things that are listed in the registry.
I seriously doubt that any two PC's are going to have the same size of registry.

Add Sp1 and your registry will take another HIKE!
I know that this and many forums don't suggest using Registry Cleaners,
but I use "Easy Cleaner 2", which is both SAFE and Efficient for eliminating
old and out of date entries. It keeps my own registry clean, neat and running efficiently.
Then, after cleaning up the registry, I always run "NTREGOPT", to re-compress the registry
and keep it as small as possible. It's kind of like running Defrag on a hard drive.
NTREGOPT will also tell you exactly how large the registry is.

I just checked my Vista test machine, where I've received ALL the microsoft updates and installed SP1.
NTREGOPT reports the size of the registry as 53,764,096 before compression,
and 47,456,256 after compression, for a net decrease in size of 12%. That's a great savings!

200 megs for a registry? I think I'll have to say that's excessive.

I'd be running Easy Cleaner and NTREGOPT on that one immediately.

Good Luck,
Andromeda

I'm well aware of that issue, as it would be true with any other Windows OS. I'm only looking for a common variable, and not an absolute value.


I Think that if used responsibly, the better tools out there can be used as aids in finding possible problematic keys.
Only then would you manually go in and verify if the integrity of the entree is whole or not.


I've taken a look at this software, and let it do its thing....
its saying my registry is 66,322,432 bites, and 61,321,216 bites post compression [8% decrease]

*Additionally I've noticed that this software was lasted updated in 2005,
i don't know if this has any barring on its compatibility with current versions of vista,
or for that matter if it takes in account x64 reg entries(still learning about how registry reflectors and such affect software like that).



Yeah i would say so.... but that is the file size of the exported registry hierarchy, right after first boot.
I hope its not loaded into the system memory pool like that, and its just that way when in a .reg file.

You exported the registry as a .reg file?
As in, the human-readable text file?
That's going to be way bigger than the real thing.

The registry is a collection of hives and is in effect a database.
The files are located in %windir%\system32\config and have no file extension - they are also memory-mapped during the boot of the OS.
NTUSER.DAT, from the profile of the currently logged-on user, is the HKCU hive.

Here are my relevent hives, but this is a 64-bit system and it's been installed a while so is not clean:
If you go looking for your NTUSER.DAT you will need to look for system files using "dir /as" or "attrib" in the relevant folder.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms724877(VS.85).aspx

My platform is x64 as well.

Thanks for the relevant information about where the files are located, and how to distinguish there real size values. My values are similar, but more importantly not ridiculous in size as i now know now how to correctly identify them.

Seriously, I've never seen registry size be a real issue on any computer ever.

Lots (I'd be tempted to go as far as saying most) reg "cleaning" utils are more like "registry mangling apps" than anything. Yes, some might not hose it to the point where you'd notice instantly, but it feels a bit like playing russian roulette (cross your fingers, with some luck, it just might not crash your system!) They sure have the potential to break things pretty badly. And most of the gains make no real-life difference. Getting rid of a couple unused keys won't really shrink things much either.

Agreed.
Plus any Orphaned keys are no big deal either as they are never accessed by anything anymore so they simply occupy space, and very little at that. So even cleaning out 100 or more orphaned keys will not speed up a system and will only save a few Kb's of space.
In 14 years of doing Tech Help sites I've seen far more systems hosed by Registry Cleaners than I've ever seen "Fixed" by one, and none of them make any appreciable difference in performance gains. About the only way you can do that within a registry is to use a Registry Defragger which can optimize the space and put the more often accessed keys in areas that get faster disk head access times. Even that tho is only going to save a second or 2.

I didn't post this question because i was after reducing the registry in size necessarily, rather mainly to understand why it was so large(when comparing it to the norm)from the context i was viewing it in(all be it the wrong way... but that has been resolved now).

In response too the last two post, i agree that most registry cleaning apps have the potential to be more harmful than proactive in most cases. This weighs heavily on the end users as well though.

This is due in part but not limited to the fact that they(they being common registry cleaners) are designed in such a way that they are mostly an automated process with very little users verification required to validate the remove/modify action of a given key, value, or data entree. They also lack information as to why the key is considered to have an issue.

Meaning it is as simple as: click once, click twice, click thrice, and congratulations... your system is now hosed.
This allows non knowledgeable individuals who doesn't care to know "how it works, just that it does" to easily be wowed one way or the other by hype that would have them believe that there system is slow or at risk to charismatically more often than not corrupt their systems registry information because "its really as easy as 123" to fix all of your computing issues even if they don't exist.

Where as like you said there is little gain from removing a few orphaned keys in the way of noticeable system speed/free space recovery. Meaning at the expense of allowing an application to decide for you whether all the keys it selects are bad or not without giving you much variable input on the matter is an indicator of there knowledge level... This falls back on the end user though, if they don't care to become smart enough to know whats going on its there fault then.

That is why it is important to learn how theses sort of things work(registries for example), after all nothing ever gets fixed/improved unless your or someone else brakes it first.

Additionally proactive maintained doesn't hurt ether. Just so long as its done correctly. For example I've upgraded my X-FI sound drivers recently and Ive manually cleared out the old registry keys/values linking to obsolete system and driver files before doing so, that otherwise would have prevented me from upgrading without software conflict.

Bloat in the system part of the registry is not usually a problem, though occasionally 3rd party products can behave strangely and run into problems indirectly - recursively creating registry keys with seemingly random names through a bug, then attempting to parse the names later and running out of virtual address space, stack space or more critically a system resource.

But this type of problem you cannot proactively "clean", and manually pruning a handful of registry keys and their contained values will replace that part of the database with empty space, it doesn't pack it by default to reclaim the space.

Bloating of the user profile is usually a more common problem - HKEY_CURRENT_USER is mounted from NTUSER.DAT for the current user, and in some cases that can be corrupted or get too large to mount properly - though that usually leads to a simpler solution of "delete that user's profile".

A system state backup will take a snapshot of your registry, so I would recommend using that if concerned about its integrity - especially before adding new hardware or changing drivers, for example... just in case.

Back to registry cleaning utilities, beware those that are 32-bit and are not aware of the virtualization that occurs with 64-bit Windows, they can run into a recursion problem when trying to parse "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6423Node"... and you'd better hope the buggy software is not trying to write (or clean) something there...

Hehe the infinite Wow6423node reflector loop

can be fixed by removing the second wow6423node key eg:
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6423Node\Wow6423Node

short term resolve: your 32 bit registry scanner/cleaner won't take for ever to complete a full pass(if it ever does...)
Long term issues: unknown, as that key only comes up after SP1 and doesn't seem to affect any thing negatively after removal.

about 180-250mb depending on version of vista and what drivers are installed.