| Product: |
Advanced Registry Tracer |
| Date: |
26/06/01 (362 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: A useful utility
Disadvantages: none for what it does
First off I have to say that I don’t stick utilities on my machine for the sake of it. As a systems engineer I see a number of machines that have a number of ‘utilities’ on them to speed the machine up only to see them, well, slowdown.
So when I say this is a handy little utility I mean it.
Advanced Registry Tracer (or ‘ART’) is a way of taking snapshots of your registry before or after you make changes to your system – be it a software or hardware install for instance.
Firstly I will try and explain why I started using ART and how it has helped me and then give a quick run through some more of its features which in truth I don’t use a great deal.
In our organization we have a large number of PC’s. If you know anything about PC’s you will know that pretty much and change you make on your PC is then written to your registry. If you change you background wallpaper you change the registry. If you change your network settings you change the registry. What isn’t that easy is to find out what has actually changed in the registry without having to do a lot of searching.
As an example of this we needed to change a network setting on all of our PC’s for what is known as a WINS server under the TCP/IP network settings. On a test machine I then ran a registry snapshot. I then changed the WINS settings and re-ran the snapshot and compared the two. This showed exactly what changes had been made in the registry and allowed me to make a REG update file to distribute to all the machines. The more complicated the changes the more useful ART becomes.
I have also used ART when testing new hardware and software. If the install goes bad I just undo my registry changes. In theory Add/Remove software should clean up the registry when you de-install software but quite often little bits get left.
ART works under all flavours of Windows, including 2000, and has a host more of other features, which I
haven’t used too much yet. This includes scanning the registry on a remote computer, undo and redo registry changes and an optional command line interface. I shall add to my review as I use these other features.
ART is shareware for a 30-day evaluation period after which it must be bought for a pretty reasonable $40.
Summary:
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Last comment:
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hotmail_ptj - 26/06/01 A rabbit wrote all this, Good on its self its a great op.
Chris:)
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