That's really too much now

[Numanoid]

My mind boggles at what computing will be like in 9 years time

How was desktop computing in 2008, not really that different from how it is today. So why should it be very different in 2026 ?

[Jace-BeOS]

I'm not expecting it to change much myself. Intel has stopped speeding things up and Apple doesn't like to build workstation class computers much anymore. iPads will marginally speed up. The rest, I don't care about.

[Jace-BeOS]

...the successor to Win 10..., hopefully less hassle free ...

You want more hassles? Aren't most versions of Windows "less hassle free" than their predecessors?

[fmr]

...the successor to Win 10..., hopefully less hassle free ...

You want more hassles? Aren't most versions of Windows "less hassle free" than their predecessors?

Oh, come on... You are being mean.

[incubus]

Squirrel please, make sure you have copies of all your software because you are gonna need it

So far S-gear. I can remember having to go through this bullshit with other lesser computers.

FOAD microshit!

[incubus]

And......I just LOVE how all my settings that are carefully fine-adjusted for mouse/etc just go "pooof" ... it's bliss ... does anybody remember bliss?????

As an added bonus of grief, you can't go to mac. It's too expensive and woefully underpowered and THEY bork their own OS all the time too

[rifftrax]

Registry is not monolithic, not often corrupted and perfectly manageable.

.jon's right you know. The windows registry is actually a composite of like a dozen separate files (definitely not monolithic) with the ability to connect remote and network hives, search, modify context windows, etc. You should really be backing it up on a consistent basis as a best practice however.

As far as "corruption" goes, really most forms of registry corruption are going to be due to a HD failure (partial or otherwise), poorly behaving/coded program installers/un-installers, and malware. The introduction of the kernel transactional mananger (KTM) in Vista and beyond basically ensured that actual windows system component updates and programs that make changes the right way are always able to essentially unfuck themselves if the power goes out or something interrupts a process that touches critical system files.

[DarkStar]

^^^^
What's the best way to back it up / reload it? All I can see are the Export and Import menu choices.

[Googly Smythe]

...unfuck themselves...

Interesting phrase!

[rifftrax]

Well, nearly so. What is it, two monstrous binary database files?

Nope. Unless your idea of "monstrous" is a couple hundred megs spread across about a dozen or so separate files not including their KTM records and logs.

Maybe not very often, but more often than is tolerable for a critical piece of software (the friggin OS), and it's often very serious and not fixable when it happens. It is a central point of failure fir an entire system. It has spawned, like so much of Wondows, a cottage industry of tools to maintain the operating system health, some of which are entirely placebo.

Sure it's complex, but not any more complex than anything else that has significant and direct ties back to kernel operation. On the other hand, constantly having to trash plist files in OSX and still having stuff not work right is just as big a pain in the ass.

Complexity is the enemy of reliability and the registry is ridiculously complex. It's not even entirely human readable through the editor. It grows constantly. Registry errors result in the need for system reinstallation (or at least backup restoration), rather than simply deleting and replacing a preference file. Hell, the simple fact that the registry grows continuously (as does the WinSxS folder) results in a need to semiannually reinstall from scratch to recover system speed and reliability.

What? Since when in the hell does registry size affect system performance? Are you crazy? Lol, it's not like the entire damn thing get's cached and requires something to reference it anytime data is read from a drive. This is simply not true. Anyway it's very easy to look at performance monitor and actually correlate where your specific speed and I/O bottlenecks are happening.

The alternative of configuration storage (individual, human-readable files) is far less likely to result in such critical system failure.

This is silly. You absolutely cannot make everything human readable at this level. That's like requiring every programmer to pen the equivalent of a novel in code commenting. At some point you have to store stuff in raw binary or strings (encrypted or otherwise) that make reference to weird and unknown low-level variables, registers, and function names. If you have a lot of programs that are writing a boatload of crap to the registry then first-off that's shitty programming and in no way the fault of Microsoft.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2684 ... s-registry

Look, I hate Microsoft as much as anyone but I'm not going to willy-nilly bash everything under the sun that they've touched. The reality is that the registry is actually a relatively mature and sophisticated approach that offers a ton of program level readability (across APIs and program calls) to a general repository of global, system, and user level configurations that can each have their own NTFS access controls and auditing.

[rifftrax]

^^^^
What's the best way to back it up / reload it? All I can see are the Export and Import menu choices.

Don't use that method and definitely DO NOT use the import function if you're going to blow-out and replace an entire existing registry. The problem here is triggering an import attempts a merge and because you're actively running the operating system it's going to basically fail (services don't like when their configuration on a low-level gets updated in real-time) and then you'll have all kinds of problems.

The right way to restore an existing registry is simply make sure this entire folder is getting backed up:
C:\Windows\System32\config

If you end up with some kind of corruption or malware that starts wreaking havoc, boot into a WinPE partition, delete the existing folder, and restore (i.e. copy the full contents using xcopy or robocopy) from a backup. I'd also run a full chkdsk /r to make sure you don't just end up potentially writing the restored registry on new bad sectors. Then just boot back into Windows.

[rifftrax]

I'll also mention that it's interesting to note that although much of the "registry tweak" areas are absolute hogwash, Microsoft themselves actually list some specific areas you can modify to potentially land some relatively modest performance gains:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/librar ... s.10).aspx

Although these are targeted towards a server application, as long as you search the specific keys you should be able to find the equivalent locations in a normal Win7/8/10 environment to modify. You can also do some things like re-assign your pagefile to a separate small SSD (not the boot disk) and manually lock both minimum and maximum size to match the size of the installed RAM you have.

[Aleatoriac]

My mind boggles at what computing will be like in 9 years time

How was desktop computing in 2008, not really that different from how it is today. So why should it be very different in 2026 ?

Exponential change.

Singularitarians forget, however, that mass stupidity almost entirely nullifies exponential change.

[incubus]

My mind boggles at what computing will be like in 9 years time

How was desktop computing in 2008, not really that different from how it is today. So why should it be very different in 2026 ?

Exponential change.

Singularitarians forget, however, that mass stupidity almost entirely nullifies exponential change.

Smart phones/pads have changed the WAY we do computing, but computers themselves have really changed very little other than the inclusion of SSD since that time.

2026? By then microsucks will have completed "Borg edition 2" (or maybe 3) and you'll be too busy serving to care.

[DarkStar]

^^^^
What's the best way to back it up / reload it? All I can see are the Export and Import menu choices.

Don't use that method and definitely DO NOT use the import function if you're going to blow-out and replace an entire existing registry. The problem here is triggering an import attempts a merge and because you're actively running the operating system it's going to basically fail (services don't like when their configuration on a low-level gets updated in real-time) and then you'll have all kinds of problems.

That's why I asked

[The right way to restore an existing registry is simply make sure this entire folder is getting backed up: C:\Windows\System32\config

If you end up with some kind of corruption or malware that starts wreaking havoc, boot into a WinPE partition, delete the existing folder, and restore (i.e. copy the full contents using xcopy or robocopy) from a backup. I'd also run a full chkdsk /r to make sure you don't just end up potentially writing the restored registry on new bad sectors. Then just boot back into Windows.

WinPE? I do not have such a partition.