Faster manual registry compress/defrag

This is a wonderfull section for Windows 98 lover like me.

One great advantage of Windows 9x is the ability to compress/defrag the registry. There are several application that offer this. We can also do it manually.

Windows also has standard application for registry compress/defrag, scanreg. This process can be very slow, we can do it much faster with the help of ramdrive.sys.

Step 1, backup the registry:

To compress Windows 9x registry you need to back the registry first. The fastest thing to do this is from inside Windows GUI. You can do this at boot command prompt to but it will be a lot slower.

I usually use date as registry file name to make it easier for me to remember it from command prompt. command:

regedit /e c:\20091120.txt

Step 2, enabling ramdrive:

We use ramdrive to allow faster processing of registry. We can also skip this step but it will make registry import process a lot slower.

Put more line config.sys:

device=c:\windows\setver.exe
device=c:\windows\himem.sys
device=c:\windows\ramdrive.sys 30000 512 /E

Remember the resulting ramdrive drive. For this example I use h:

Step 3, importing backup:

If you skip ramdrive then the command at boot command prompt is:

regedit /c c:\20091120.txt

If you use ramdrive then the command at boot command prompt is:

cd windows
attrib -r -h -s
copy system.dat h:\
copy user.dat h:\
copy system.dat system.sav
copy user.dat user.sav
regedit /l:h:\system.dat /r:h:\user.dat /c c:\20091120.txt
.............
copy h:\*.dat c:\windows

After this use "edit" to change the config.sys to remove the ramdrive line.

edit c:\config.sys

If something wrong happen during registry import, copy back the file backup to original at boot command prompt:

c:\
cd windows
attrib -r -h -s
copy system.sav system.dat
copy user.sav user.dat

If your registry never been compressed before you will notice a significant application response time.

PS. I write this from my memory. Please mention any wrong syntax.

Edited November 20, 200916 yr by sucahyo