Regshot is a long running utility that can quickly take a before and after snapshot of the system registry. Here’s a selection of 7 tools that can track what file and registry changes are made during a software install by creating and then comparing before and after snapshots of your system, all were tested on Windows 7. One way to find out yourself what is getting added to your system during a software install is to actually check the state of your system before the installation, and then check again afterwards to see what has changed.
Depending on the program and how good the uninstaller is, this could range from one or two innocuous registry keys right up to hundreds of keys and several Megabytes of leftover files. Most of the time there is useless data left over which should have been removed because the uninstaller maybe is corrupted or even badly programmed. And when you want to uninstall the software it should but doesn’t always remove everything that was added in the first place. We’ll use my favorite application, PuTTY (a simple ssh/terminal client) as an example.Usually when software gets installed onto your computer, it copies the needed files and registry entries onto the system for the program to function properly. There exist many methods and tools for this task, but leveraging Process Monitor is by far the most complete and thorough. In the case of application settings retention or personalization, we need to know WHERE an application is storing all it’s user-relevant settings. The problem is, most application teams strangely don’t have a lot of “under the hood” knowledge of an application’s inner workings. As the owner of the platform, you need to be sure that the settings for this new application are captured and persisted across user sessions. Let’s say you have been handed an application by your Apps team for integration into a Citrix or Horizon environment. In order to make process monitor useful, the filters need to be leveraged. It can be downloaded directly from Microsoft, and is regularly updated: Anybody who has run the process monitor tool has seen the tens-of-thousands of results it will produce – without you even attempting to CAUSE any results. While extremely detailed, the results are often more overwhelming than they are helpful. That is, it monitors and records virtually every action taken by every process on a system. ProcMon is (oddly enough) a Process Monitor. If you have ever been in the position of needing to know how and what an application is doing, without yourself having any knowledge of said application, then ProcMon is the discovery tool for you.
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