Registry

[Broomjockey]

Okay, so I was doing my normal computer maintenance today, and on a tip from a friend, found a registry cleaner and added that to my routine. On my laptop it took maybe 20 minutes to go through, found some stuff, and axed it.

My desktop's been running for over 2 hours now. I did a quick backup of the registry, and noted the file size. It's over 330 MB. Is this something to be concerned about? Am I likely to get a major problem when the registry finishes and I click on "Fix these problems?"

The scanner's not frozen, as I stopped it after an hour the first time, and it told me I had more than 1000 invalid or incorrect entries. Unfortunately it won't let me fix any issues until it finishes the scan. Running Vista Home Premium x64 if that helps. I did a quick google search but couldn't find anything about how big a registry normally is.

[SteeleDragon78]

while that is a rather large registry i have seen larger on some enterprise boxes. if you have a lot of stuff on the machine that could contribute to the size. im surprised that the reg scanner took so long to run. longest ive seen on go was 15 min. how long has your desktop been up?

[Broomjockey]

I put a new motherboard in it that necessitated a reformat about 4 or 5 months ago. I didn't think I had that many programs installed

The scanner's *still* running, btw.

[Broomjockey]

Geebus. Thing just finished and found around 8300 problems. Is this something I should be concerned about? Is it symptomatic of a more serious issue? Both AVG and Spy-Bot gave me clean bills of health, so it's not likely to be a common virus or spyware.

[SteeleDragon78]

i think i have to ask what reg cleaner did you install. most of the cleaners i know of are usually bundled with other software (eg. windows live care, iobits advance windows care, Norton system works). that does seem like a rather high instance of errors though. i will admit my experience with vista is quite limited (company i work for doesn't support it) and its all in dealing with my laptop running vista home premium 32 bit- and mine has had a number of bugs and such.( i was trying to crash it) but most ive seen on mine was 150 errors. just for chuckles you might run a different cleaner to see if you're getting erroneous info from this one

[Broomjockey]

I got it from "Glary Utilities." After it finished my registry was a whole megabyte smaller. Woo hoo.
Can you suggest a stand-alone one to use to check it against?

And on a bizarre note, I restarted after the scan to see if everything was still good (nothing obviously broken yet), however, the little "Safely remove hardware" icon is in my system tray, and it says I can remove my DVD drives, and my HDD. I have never had that on my computers, and it's not on my laptop for its DVD drive, though I did all the same stuff to it that I did to my desktop. It's nothing major, just weirds me out.

[SteeleDragon78]

ok this is moving from the weird to the the safely remove option is for hot swappable items only, usb and firewire usually. something is wonky here, as i said previously that my experience with vista is limited, but i don't think its supposed to do that

[Broomjockey]

Well, they're all SATA drives. Aren't those supposed to be hotswappable? The thing that gets me though is I can take out the HDD. That the OS is on. The *only* HDD in the system.

[Geek King]

Well, they're all SATA drives. Aren't those supposed to be hotswappable? The thing that gets me though is I can take out the HDD. That the OS is on. The *only* HDD in the system.

Um, my DVD and hard drives don't show up as removable, and I use SATA drives in my Vista. Just whatever flash drives/cameras/mp3 player/USB doo-hicky I have plugged in at the time show on the safe to remove list. I think something flakey is going on too. Any other issues when using the computer at this time?

[Broomjockey]

Nope, no issues. Everything's working fine. Mouse, keyboard, mic on the webcam (never use the cam portion), DVD player, High-Def player, all the programs I've used (except the DVD player program that got borked by its latest patch before I did all this).


...Oddly, the USB webcam's never shown up as removable. Then again, it did install itself, including software.

[Geek King]

I'd probably chalk it up to an oddity, and ignore it then. Just be careful not to tell it to safely remove your hard drive. Although my curiosity is piqued, who knows what it might do to your system. At any rate, we're here to help if something does happen.

[LostMyMind]

Probably won't let you "remove" the boot hard drive. It'll go through the motions and not do it. Yes, I've had that happen to me before. It happen to me when I swapped a hard drive during my hard drive crash.