However, I could not find a simple way to copy the missing/changed items from one hive to another and did not receive any answer from their customer support, so I gave up trying with it.

Registrar Register Manager It has a built in comparison function that will compare hives that you have loaded.

I wanted to compare actual hives and not exported files and to be able to easily copy things between them. A good commercial tool for MSIs is AdvancedInstaller

For MSI installers, I suggest either Microsoft’s own ORCA or InstEd. I find that 7Zip is the best way to look inside most executable installers (such as NSIS), because you can see the files and scripts and such. That way you can avoid the whole detection process altogether. file to see for yourself exactly what it does when it installs, including changes to files, registry entries, services, drivers, and such.

That is, look inside the EXE/MSI/BAT/INF/etc. I generally like my old copy of InCtrl5, but Z-Soft Uninstaller has the same function and is exceptional (it’s the best of the dozen or so that I have tried) plus, it’s free.Īnother solution is to analyse the installer itself. Total Uninstall is a good commercial one. They have released an update called InCtrlX which presumably, is better.

Again, there are plenty of them, but one of the main ones is PC Magazine’s InCtrl5 (you may have to pay to download it from their site, though the program itself is free, so there are plenty of sites that have it). If you want to compare the registry before and after an installation, then you may as well use an installation monitor. Use WinMerge instead because it can handle large files, diff them faster, and the results are better (sometimes Windiff just gets it wrong). If you want to compare two registry files (that you have manually exported to text), then there are plenty of comparison apps, such as WinMerge, WinDiff, etc.Ī word of caution: if the registry hive is large, then exporting can take a while, and worse, Windiff can more or less hang when trying to read large.

Sysinternals registry monitor