Creating and Comparing Registry Snapshots
October 29, 2010 (updated 7 years ago) by Chemtable Software
In one of the articles, we already told you that Reg Organizer has a special tool to install software and keep a log of changes, allowing the user to track all modifications of the system during the installation of software. The program monitors all changes made to the registry and hard disks (you can select a disk to monitor in program settings).
However, it may be useful to monitor changes not only during the installation of a new application but also when you run a program that has already been installed. Usually, this kind of monitoring is used to examine the performance of an application over a specific period of time. For this purpose, you can use the tool for creating and comparing snapshots of the registry which is available in Reg Organizer.
The tool for creating and comparing registry snapshots can be found on the Applications Uninstaller dialog. To create a snapshot, click the Applications Uninstaller button, click on the Registry Snapshots tab, select root keys to be included into a snapshot and, and then start the procedure. After using the application for some time, you need to repeat the procedure again. Any snapshot can be deleted with the Remove a Registry Snapshot command.
When you have two or more snapshots, you can perform a comparison. On the Registry Snapshots tab, click the Compare Two Snapshots button, and then select snapshots to be compared. Results of a comparison are saved to a log file similar to the one created when you install a program with Reg Organizer.
To view a log of a snapshot comparison, you need to click on the Change Logs tab, and then select the required log in the drop-down list box. After this the program displays changes written to the file. Registry changes are shown as a tree-like structure (registry key tree). There is the Expand All button below the drop-down list box. Using this button, you can expand all nodes of the change tree with a single mouse click.
The context menu of the Registry Changes tab has an interesting option that saves any selected registry key to file. It is important to remember that the program saves the value of a registry key as it is written in a log, rather than the current value of a key. Sometimes one saved key corresponds to several modified parameters. When the program saves to file, each parameter is written to a separate REG file. To avoid confusion, these files are placed to one and the same folder. You can specify the name of the folder when you save the key values.
