Check and Compress the Registry

The Windows registry is growing with every piece of software and system changes and never gets reduced again on its own. While this is not a problem for most users it could become for users who make lots of changes to their system. A huge registry is slowing down system load which is actually the number one reason why a user should check his registry from time to time and compress it so that it system load time gets reduced again.

Windows already has a tool in place that can compress the registry again and restore the compressed registry. Restoring the registry can only be done before Windows is loaded which means that this has to be done using a boot disk of some sort or another way to boot into DOS.

Before you go all crazy you could check to see if it makes sense to compress the registry and restore it. To do that you need to use the following commands using the command line in Windows: (press return after each line)

pushd %windir%\system32\config
reg save HKLM\Software software.hiv
reg save HKLM\System system.hiv
dir software
dir software.hiv
dir system
dir system.hiv

Compare the sizes of software and software.hiv & system and system.hiv. It probably makes sense to restore the files if the difference is larger than one Megabyte for software and larger than 400 Kilobyte for system. Please note that you need to perform the commands in DOS.

reg restore HKLM\Software software.hiv
reg restore HKLM\System system.hiv