Number 197 - October 1999

Yeeehaaaaa! I did the Registry!
by Claud Sibert, NOCCC claud.e.sibert@worldnet.att.net - Aug '98
I refer to Terry Warren, NOCCC, "RegClean 4.1a", Orange Bytes, page 15, July 1998, and to other previous presentations and articles (especially by John Krill) of this general topic.     Conjuring courage, I decided to prepare a system boot disk (as my first step.) Activating File Manager, I generated the system boot disk. I did a cold boot on my computer with the system boot disk in the A: drive. The computer displayed a message that Windows 95 is starting. OOPS I thought, yes, yes, the message is false, and the A: prompt appears on the screen. Immediately, I begin keying in DOS commands to test the operating system. The system responds as I expected, all is well. At this point, I cold boot the computer again, without the system disk and begin Windows 95.     I copy cfgback.exe from my Windows 95 CD-ROM into a directory on the C: drive. I then run cfgback.exe to backup the REGISTRY. This is rather straightforward. I choose a file name for the backup and proceed. I then decided to restore the REGISTRY. This restore was also straightforward and successful. Next, I decided to backup the REGISTRY after the restore and use a different name for the backup file on disk, again successfully. At this point, I went in quest of RegClean 4.1a. I found RegClean 4.1a at ftp.microsoft.com/softlib/mslfiles.	The regclean.exe download file is 800,136 bytes. I also downloaded regmaid.exe (262,066 bytes) and regview (68,748 bytes.) Regclean.exe expands into the C:\windows\temp directory. There I found regclean.exe (837,632 bytes), oadist.exe (490,096 bytes) and readme.txt (8,021 bytes.)     Readme.txt informed me that I must install the update to the OLE Automation System libraries. Therefore, I ran the oadist.exe program first. The program informed me that many of my DLL files were more recent than the files within oadist.exe. I chose not to replace my more recent files. Now, I run the regclean.exe program. The program runs transparently. Finally, a window appears with a FIX ERRORS button. I clicked the FIX ERRORS button. It appears that regclean.exe actually did something. I now have a file, undo70~1.reg (8,989 bytes.)     Finally, I run cfgback.exe to backup the registry after cleanup. I assign a third different name. Curiously, regardless of how I name the registry backup files, cfgback.exe uses the names: regback1.rbk, regback2.rbk and regback3.rbk. These files are located in the Windows directory. Also, these files must be in the Windows directory for the restore feature of cfgback.exe.     I hope this information will be useful to you readers.     Copyright (c) 1995-7 by North Orange County Computer Club. All rights reserved.
Number 197 - October 1999