The registry

[unixronin]

Once again, a question has come up on the Bacula users' list about restoring just the registry of a Windows box that has corrupted its SOFTWARE registry hive to the point that it won't boot.

I put it to you that of all the "innovative" ideas that Microsoft has built into Windows over the years, the Windows Registry is the worst.  It is opaque, it is fragile, it is difficult to back up, clean out or repair, you can pretty much only repair it from Windows itself which means that it's almost impossible to repair it when — not if — Windows corrupts it, and all kinds of noxious things can be buried inside it by malware.  Not only does Windows periodically outright corrupt the registry, but from the first time you boot a new Windows installation the registry starts accumulating cruft and droppings that gradually bog the machine down and introduce cryptic malfunctions with no readily determinable cause.  Things that worked yesterday just stop working for no apparent reason.

Combine with opaque hexadecimal-string registry key names created by various things, so that you can't even tell what some random leftover registry key belongs to or whether it's still in use, and it's a recipe for disaster.  That disaster has been ongoing for fifteen years now, and there's no end in sight.

The saddest part about the whole thing is that Microsoft actually believed that this massive, opaque, monolithic, unmaintainable monstrosity would be an improvement.

Comments

[polaris93.livejournal.com]

I found out the hard way, much to my disgust, that Windows Vista sucked -- no, that's not right, it sucks squared. And now they want me to "upgrade" to Windows 7? Yeah, right . . .

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Actually, from what I've heard, 7 actually is a lot better than Vista. You might think of Vista as Windows 7 service pack -1, or as a Windows 7 alpha release. Microsoft very literally released Vista unfinished to make their promised ship deadline. Over the last six months to a year, they dropped feature after feature that they simply couldn't finish in time.

[polaris93.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm not surprised. That's right in line with the way they do their software -- and let's not even think about Windows 95! (About which many swear that when Bill Gates dies, he'll go there.) In the meantime, I'm sticking with Windows XP, which I have on my cheapie Overstock.com refurbished computer. It works very well, is very stable, and is like the Cadillac of platforms compared to its Microsoft predecessors. (Yes, yes, I know I should use Unix or one of those other long-tested, superbly performing platforms, but I'm very used to Windows XP after all these years, and learning how to use a completely different platform at my age, what with my also having to use a lot of time (when I'm not playing with Youtube and LiveJournal, anyway) on my fiction writing and related matters, is a bit more difficult than I really want to tackle right now. Maybe when my novels get bought by Quentin Tarantino to make movies and I've got my new mansion with hot and cold running servants and a secretary . . . ;-)