Regscanner advanced Registry search

It’s kinda funny. I was prepared to write about Regscanner all day long when I discovered that Kevin over at Lifehacker did post about the Nirsoft utility as well. If you have ever used the Windows Registry Editor before you might have asked yourself why Microsoft did not implement a better search in the tool, they surely should have had enough time to do so in the past years. If you perform a search in Regedit you jump from one entry to the next like the search in text applications. A far better solution for Regedit however would be to display all search results at once which would give the user more control.

Regscanner is the usual high quality Nirsoft application. You can run it from any location without installation it and it works right out of the box. The Regscanner search form might look a bit intimidating but it is actually providing some much needed functions. It offers all the search functionality of Regedit plus the following advanced options:

• Case Sensitive Search
• Searching for Unicode String in Binary Value
• Exact Matches plus five additional criterias for matching strings.
• Display keys that have been modified in a time range
• Display data of a certain size (in bytes)
• Display only values of a certain type (like DWORD)
• Scan one, several or all Registry base keys

A double-click on an entry opens the selected key in Regedit. Results can be exported as .reg files which can be imported into Regedit.