Windows Registry Wrapper?

After some months after the last system clean up, I'd need to format my HD and do a fresh install.
But that would mean spend like a week installing programs, mostly photoshop and all the plugins i have.

After having used a mac for some time, i just love it's ability to drag a program from a system to another and instantly make it work.
And it's not like on windows it couldn't be the same, there are a lot of different programs that just works.

The main problem to make it work OS all programs, is that once you reinstall the system and copy the program folder, you'll just copy the program files, and not the program registry entry.

Then a idea came to my mind. (and it's probably a stupid one, as no one came up with something like that yet)
Do you think it would be possible to make a register wrapper, so that every time a registry system call is make, this wrapper catches the call, and if it's a write call it writes the data in a local file in the same directory of the calling program. and then uploads the register.
And if it's a read call, it just firstly looks in the local directory for a local registry file, and if it's there it just uses that data, and if it's not there then it looks at the main registry file and then (if it wasn't reading system data) it copies the read data in the local file.
It would work a bit like a cache, and it would let programs to work just by moving the installed folder.
(OK one should still check if the program doesn't scatter files around the HD, but I guess that's less complicated)

What do you think?
 
There is a program called regmon available free at http://www.sysinternals.com that snoops on all registry activity. That suggests to me that what you are suggesting is technically possible. I don't think it would be very practicle however. The volume of traffic to and from the registry is huge so shadowing it would slow your system down quite a lot.

Also what you are suggesting could be construed as an attempt to bypass copyright controls and hence land whoever develops it in hot water legally.
 
Lots of installer programs allow you to repackage applications. They do a pre-scan of the disks and registry, you install the application and they run a post-scan. Everything that has changed is assembled into an exe or a msi package. Double-click that to install, run the uninstall to remove. It makes the installing and uninstalling of applications into a one-click thing. And they all generate some script in which you can see exactly what was changed. If you only want to save the registry entries, you can delete everything else and recompile. And they all support variables for things like the paths of the files.
 
NocturnDragon said:
After some months after the last system clean up, I'd need to format my HD and do a fresh install.
But that would mean spend like a week installing programs, mostly photoshop and all the plugins i have.
Why not install Windows, apply latest patches, install all drivers and all your software and using something like Norton Ghost to create an image of your drive? Then you can just use that in future to restore your machine to how you wanted, with everything configured and installed?
 
Diplo said:
Why not install Windows, apply latest patches, install all drivers and all your software and using something like Norton Ghost to create an image of your drive? Then you can just use that in future to restore your machine to how you wanted, with everything configured and installed?

I tried it once, but when I needed to reinstall a new version of Photoshop was out, all new drivers, and a lot of programs update. So i prefered to do a fresh install.

What i want wis something like a register monitor and what DiGuru suggested, instead of reinstall the application to let the program know what keys it creates, you just use it, and the monitor register all the keys accessed and created, and puts them on a file, then when you move the program to a fresh install it just copies all the registry keys, (either as they are used, or all thogheter).


P.S. back in the day when they were still talking about Blackcomb and not many Longhorn informations were out, I seem to remember to read somewhere that the new version of windows was not getting a registry. Guess they were wrong.
 
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