REGEDIT COMPARE TIP!

I have been meaning to send this out for a while, but just haven’t gotten around to it. Anyway if you are like me you are spending a lot of time in the Registry, I find that I am constantly making a change to an application and tracking it with a tool (RegScanner, RegFromApp, etc.) but sometimes there is no substitute for just good ole eyeballing it. The problem is that usually you have loaded the Mandatory profile in under HKEY_USERS and you wind up scrolling up and down looking for the subtle change that the application made.

Wouldn’t it be nice to just load up another copy of the registry and place them side by side? Give it a shot, unfortunately, RegEdit is too smart for its own good and realizes that it is already loaded, so it just brings the running copy to the foreground.

Now try this, launch RegEdit again but this time, run RegEdit –M, and there you have it, multiple copies of the Registry editor running! Now you can place them side by side and have a good and proper look.

While we are on the topic of the registry, by now everyone should be familiar with the fact that in the 64-bit world all local machine 32-bit stuff winds up being placed in the Wow6432Node area of the registry, but if you want to really see the registry the same way a 32-bit app sees it, go to C:\Windows\syswow64\Regedit.exe and you will get the same 32-bit view that an application sees. Feel free to combine the two tips so you can verify that the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software really is the same as HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Wow6432Node running them side by side.

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