2013-05-12

A pristine Windows Registry

The following files were exported from a pristine installation of Windows 7 Ultimate x64 living inside a virtual machine created by VMware Player.  So, they represent a default (clean) copy of the registry of that windows system before installing any software on it.  (Well, except for VMware Tools.)


Here is the .ZIP file containing all the .REG files. (9.5 MB)

IMPORTANT NOTICE: The location of these files may change in the future, but the location of this blog post will not, so if you want to provide links, please make sure to link to this post, not to the actual .reg files.

Explanation:

For reference purposes, I needed to get my hands on a default (clean) copy of the registry of Windows. I could not find anything on the interwebz, so I had to load Windows into a virtual machine and extract the registry from it.  I figured that this may be useful to many people out there, so I have posted the results of my labor.

6 comments:

  1. Thanks Michael, very kind of you. I needed these registry files for a project I'm doing with Windows 7.

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    Replies
    1. Ah, at last, this post proves to be of use to someone out there! I am very glad to be of help, Robert!

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    2. Oh, I'm sure it's been of some use to others out there--unfortunately, not everyone takes the time to say "thank you" these days. You needed to extract these files for your own purposes, but you certainly didn't need to take the time to post them for the benefit of others. The way I see it, that kind of altruism at least deserves a quick note of appreciation.

      On a technical note, I'm normally religious about backing up my registry files with the wonderful ERUNT (you know this one? an oldie but definitely a goodie), but it never occurred to me to do a "baseline" backup, and file away some fresh registry files before they are polluted by the chaff of day-to-day computing. I honestly never thought I'd need them...until now.

      BTW, it's also nice to see someone read--and take the time to respond to--the comments on their own blog (especially on a post that's over two years old!). That's also not a given these days. Anyway, I've bookmarked your site for future reading.

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    3. BTW Michael,

      I don't know if you're aware of this, but the Google Docs page is serving up these files as .html pages, not as bona-fide .reg files. (At least I don't think it was by your design, since they are labeled as ".reg" files in your post, and it's highly unlikely that someone would want to view these files in their web browser). In any case, I can strip out the html, or just cut the needed content from between the 'pre' tags, but I'm not sure someone else would know what to do.

      If I may make a humble suggestion: instead of posting a link to each hive separately, I would just bundle all the 'raw' .reg files into a zip archive and make it a single download. This would be a convenience to your potential "customers" (heh) in that they only need to pull down a single file, instead of clicking 8 or 9 times if they needed all of them. Better for you, your bandwidth is reduced since these files compress quite nicely, being all text (for example, the 50MB 'Software' file compresses down to under 5MB with zip, and just a hair over 2MB with 7z, as a quick experiment finds)
      Hmm, on second thought... maybe it doesn't actually benefit you, since this is Blogger I don't think bandwidth is of great concern. Well, in any case, let's just say it will be a much quicker download! And Google is prevented from tampering with the files.

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    4. Robert, you are right. The reason why I did it this way is because I thought that it would make it easier for search engines to discover the .REG files, but it did not work well at all. So, now I replaced the individual .REG files with a .ZIP file. Thanks for pointing this out to me.

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    5. Sure, no problem. Thanks again for putting them out there!

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