Once in a while, I need to be able to search through my registry and find a bunch of values related to a piece of software that did not uninstall its information properly. A friend of mine wanted to know what utility I used for this, and I couldn’t find it online. Consequently I spent about 3 hours google-ing away trying to find a free or open source app to do this seemingly simple task.
What! you may be exclaiming, can’t you do that with good ole regedit.exe? Well, you can search and delete values but this is kind of tedious, since regedit doesn’t present you with a list to delete en masse. Wouldn’t it be much nicer to do a search, and get back a list of matches, then be able to select which ones you want to delete?
I thought so as well. And so did the good folks at NirSoft and AloneWolf Software both applications are reviewed, make your own choice to meet your needs! Both of the authors sites contain numerous very useful specific utilities. I highly recommend you take a look around their sites.
Registry Search and Delete (RSD v1.2):
HERE is the Authors Russian page for Registry Search and Delete [RSD.exe]
HERE is the English translated page courtesy of Babel Fish
I scanned the binary with the current version of NOD32, and have run the app without any damage to my machine, so you should feel confident its a solid application. However I do suggest that any binary you download, you scan first with a reliable anti-virus scanner. This app seems very solidly written, have a very simple interface, and best of all, does exactly what it is designed to do very well, without a lot of bloat like may other utilities out there. It also doesn’t require installation, simple run the binary by double clicking on it — Go figure, a registry editor that writes very little to the registry (may of the other utilities don’t share this design philosophy).
Here are some screenshots:
Selecting the hive to search and typing in the string:
During a Search:
After a Search:
Deleting the values:
Auto-undo file: [created in directory where RSD was run]. This file is a registry file, and if double clicked, will add the data back to the registry!
Here is the contents of the above file “Undo 08_01_09 02.reg”:
And my registry after removing with RSD [no FredTesting in HKEY_CURRENT_USER]:
After double-clicking the undo file:
Performance: [searching makes FULL use of the CPU to complete the search quickly]
Registry Scanner (RegScanner v1.70):
Initially, I had tried an alternate program, which does scan the registry very quickly. It’s Registry Scanner [RegScanner] by NirSoft (also freeware), however though I like the scanning feature, there is no possibility to delete found values (from the found screen):
Here is the search window [allowing much more detailed find]:
The resulting found values:
Select the values by ctl+click:
The ONLY way to delete the values is by creating a .reg file to remove the selected values:
After selecting to create the delete .reg file, and telling RegScanner where to save it, here is what it contains:
here is my test entry still in the registry:
and after executing the file (double-clicking) [only the string was removed since that is all we searched for]:
In summery, I like both utilities. RegScanner seems to be a faster scanner, but requires an extra step to actually delete the values. However it is more complicated, but this allows more precise scanning. Both do a very good job and are both free to use even commercially as long as the copyright requirements are met.
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