Advanced Registry Tracer (ART) is an utility designed to analyse changes made to Windows Registry.
When installing software, it is possible to make a copy of the Registry before the installation and another one after the installation, to compare the copies and to see what changes the software has made.
ART also allows to check what changes to the Registry installing new hardware (extension cards, periphery devices, etc) has caused. Moreover, ART can be used to compare configuration of different computers. ART can do comparing not only in the entire Regisrty, but also in any key of the Registry. It is also possible to exclude any keys of the Registry from compare results.
Unlike Registry monitoring software (e.g. such as RegMon and Win-Expose Registry), and most uninstallers (CleenSweep, Uninstall, etc.), ART compares full copies of the Registry made in different moments of time, whereas the above software products monitor all accesses to the Registry within the certain time interval and then filter them, which sometimes result in errors since other applications and the system could also modify the Registry during the same time. The main ART window looks like the following:
ART works with one file where you can store as many Registry scans as you want (within reason, of course -- we tested up to 50 scans). With this "database", you can also do such operations as serch and comparing.
The program doesn't support such operations with different files!
ART searches for differences on all levels: in Keys,
in Values Names, and in Values Data. Results of the comparison are displayed
as three trees (see below).
Based on the comparison results, ART creates Undo and Redo files in *.reg and *.inf format. These files can be used to modify the Registry by switching from the newer
copy to the older one and vice versa.
ART deals only with root keys HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE and HKEY_USERS, since the key HKEY_CURRENT_CONFIG is a copy of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Config\000х; HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT is a copy of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes; HKEY_CURRENT_USER is a part of HKEY_USERS; and HKEY_DYN_DATA is (normally) used by the system only
and is of no interest to a user.
To view the current state of a key, or to modify it, you can use Jump to Regedit function.
Contents of any key can be exported to *.reg file.