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Microsoft explains the lack of Registry backups in Windows 10

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Re: Microsoft explains the lack of Registry backups in Windows 10

#201

Post by Dylan16807 »

agumonkey wrote: post #161
rando444 wrote: post #5

50-100MB seems like a miniscule amount of space to warrant something like this. My WinSxS folder alone is almost 10GB. If they wanted to save space, even a modest improvement in managing updates would yield space saving results orders of magnitude greater than this.

Of all the stuff crammed automatically on Windows 10 install .. they can't be serious about saving space. I had to powershell candycrush off the drive for god's sake.

The candycrush install trigger is annoying but mere KB, it's not disk space bloat.

Re: Microsoft explains the lack of Registry backups in Windows 10

#202

Post by Dylan16807 »

will4274 wrote: post #186
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, I can understand leaving a Control Panel framework in place for opening legacy menus made by third parties. What I find problematic is the Microsoft-supplied functionality. Duplicate menus for the same thing adds an extra mental burden.

> Duplicate menus for the same thing adds an extra mental burden. I think you'd see that Microsoft gets this. Win8 was all dupes. Initial Win10 release removed most of the dupes and they've removed more with each Win10 release. The strategy is pretty clear - incremental rewrite based on what people use.

They've been removing things? The last change I noticed was the addition of a new duplicate control panel for sound.

Re: Microsoft explains the lack of Registry backups in Windows 10

#203

Post by Dylan16807 »

Litmus2336 wrote: post #115
zbentley wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Control Panel isn't that deep. It really, really is.

This week in "HN looks at software that took thousands of devs 30 years to write and says 'eh I could've done that in a day!'"

No they're not. They're looking at control panels that were mostly written between 1992 and 2000, and asking why the decade since Win7's release hasn't been enough time to get them all on the same UI framework.

"that deep" should be read in terms of the resources of a large company. It's a small fraction of the OS.

Re: Microsoft explains the lack of Registry backups in Windows 10

#204

Post by cwyers »

Razengan wrote: post #196

Can someone explain why a monolithic Registry is a good idea, compared to something like macOS's .plists? I can usually intuitively infer where the plist for a particular app or subsystem may be stored, or just search for it using regular file system tools, and I can use many tools to read, edit and selectively backup/restore plists as well as compress them (something I make use of often, to restore settings only for…

> Can someone explain why a monolithic Registry is a good idea, compared to something like macOS's .plists?

Raymond Chen has a pretty good list:

https://web.archive.org/web/20071128134315/http://blogs.msdn...

Re: Microsoft explains the lack of Registry backups in Windows 10

#205

Post by Razengan »

cwyers wrote: post #204
Razengan wrote: post #196

Can someone explain why a monolithic Registry is a good idea, compared to something like macOS's .plists? I can usually intuitively infer where the plist for a particular app or subsystem may be stored, or just search for it using regular file system tools, and I can use many tools to read, edit and selectively backup/restore plists as well as compress them (something I make use of often, to restore settings only for…

> Can someone explain why a monolithic Registry is a good idea, compared to something like macOS's .plists? Raymond Chen has a pretty good list: https://web.archive.org/web/20071128134315/http://blogs.msdn...

That link discusses the archaic .INI format versus Registry, not macOS .plist versus Registry, and already the very first point he states is outdated and irrelevant:

> INI files don't support Unicode.

His complaints about XML as an improvement over .INI don't make much sense either.

The security of individual files and their folders can be more easily reasoned about using existing filesystem paradigms, than the nodes of some abstract tree inside the Registry. And you can use existing filesystem tools to monitor which apps are accessing which plists, meanwhile you have to rely on an entirely different set of tools custom-built just for interacting with the Registry.

In practice, .plists feel much better as a user than the Registry does.

Re: Microsoft explains the lack of Registry backups in Windows 10

#206

Post by StillBored »

0815test wrote: post #170
gambiting wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree - I have one with a quad core atom, 1GB of ram(!!!) And latest windows 10 1903 edition runs very nicely on it if you stick to the built-in apps. I usually have it next to my main PC as an additional monitor with the wireless projector functionality .

I'll hazard a guess that your Win10 machine on 1GB RAM is swapping plenty. A lightweight Linux distribution can run a reasonable desktop workload (including some web browsing!) on 1GB with zilch swap use, or on as little as 512MB with tolerable use of swap. It's a bit disappointing in a way, but Linux (and not even every Linux distro, for that matter) is the only OS where I can visibly tell that I'm running something…

Well, i'm here to say that if you use a normal linux distro with KDE or Gnome your going to be in the multiple GB's of ram pretty quick. Sure you can have a stripped down linux distro with X/lxde or whatever in under 1GB, but you can also use windows IoT or Core for much the same effect.

The problem is that MS (and the mainstream linux DE's) aren't willing to admit that some of the "modernization" they have done over the last decade has done nothing but increase the visual lag while massively increasing the resource consumption for what is frequently little more than transparent windows (cause high DPI is still not quite there in both cases...).

Re: Microsoft explains the lack of Registry backups in Windows 10

#207

Post by davesmith1983 »

0815test wrote: post #170
gambiting wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree - I have one with a quad core atom, 1GB of ram(!!!) And latest windows 10 1903 edition runs very nicely on it if you stick to the built-in apps. I usually have it next to my main PC as an additional monitor with the wireless projector functionality .

I'll hazard a guess that your Win10 machine on 1GB RAM is swapping plenty. A lightweight Linux distribution can run a reasonable desktop workload (including some web browsing!) on 1GB with zilch swap use, or on as little as 512MB with tolerable use of swap. It's a bit disappointing in a way, but Linux (and not even every Linux distro, for that matter) is the only OS where I can visibly tell that I'm running something…

I have a pretty stripped down Arch Linux install and most of the ram usage comes from Firefox.

The machine uses about 2-3gb of ram with a web browser and XFCE running.

Re: Microsoft explains the lack of Registry backups in Windows 10

#208

Post by CameronNemo »

krackers wrote: post #197
Razengan wrote: post #196

Can someone explain why a monolithic Registry is a good idea, compared to something like macOS's .plists? I can usually intuitively infer where the plist for a particular app or subsystem may be stored, or just search for it using regular file system tools, and I can use many tools to read, edit and selectively backup/restore plists as well as compress them (something I make use of often, to restore settings only for…

Storing configuration as plaintext files is definitely a big positive, as it allows you to use standard and battle-tested file apis to manipulate them instead of an opaque blob that then requires an additional platform specific API. The only benefit I can see of a monolithic registry is that it's technically all organized in one central place, compared to say the Linux practice of scattering app settings in home dire…

plists are XML, not plain text.

Structured data need not be binary.

Also on Linux you have dconf, which is literally a centralized, binary configuration storage backend. I believe it is being replaced with a more decentralized mechanism to ease container use cases.

Re: Microsoft explains the lack of Registry backups in Windows 10

#209

Post by pjmlp »

rstuart4133 wrote: post #146
nightski wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like something was seriously wrong with your install. I am on a desktop running windows 10 since its release on which I use daily and install a lot of software - and the windows folder is sitting at 12 GB.

> the windows folder is sitting at 12 GB I don't think the Windows folder is a particular good indication of Windows space usage. A while ago Microsoft put a tablet killer design out there: 11 Screen, 4GB RAM, Touch Screen and 32GB SSD. Man+dog shipped them. Then man+dog found the machines died because Windows ran out of disk space on patch Tuesday. So regardless of what is in the windows directory 32GB is not enough…

I have the same issue, just with Android tablets.

Re: Microsoft explains the lack of Registry backups in Windows 10

#210

Post by cm2187 »

chris_wot wrote: post #33
cm2187 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if the current OS is completely borked, a clean re-install is probably a better route than trying to restore the registry.

Getting the last known good state of the registry can often tell you what install caused issues. Reinstalling is fine, but IMO should be a last option in many cases. Especially if you are trying to quickly recover from an incident - reinstalls take time!

Actually if you maintain a batch file with all your settings plus use chocolatey, it can be pretty quick (under 40 minutes to reinstall everything from scatch in my case).
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