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Regshot Guidelines: How To Post Relevant Bits Without Breaking The Site

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John T. Haller
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Regshot Guidelines: How To Post Relevant Bits Without Breaking The Site

Since it seems a few devs are still having issues posting regshot when doing testing, I'm going to post a few guidelines on how to do so. There are multiple reasons for this guide. First off, huge regshots with extra stuff from other apps or update processes are pretty useless for testing (there's too much noise and barely any signal). Second, huge regshots posted into comments can break the site's search indexing and cause other issues (like delaying sending out site update notifications, etc) until manually fixed. After just losing 1.5 hours to this, I figured it was time for a guide. So, off we go.

1. The best option is to have a clean install of Windows on a virtual machine like VirtualBox dedicated to regshotting apps. All extra services including Windows update are disabled. A snapshot should be done after it is setup properly with regshot available and then returned to after each test.

1a. Barring that, you can use your main PC. If you do so, you should shut down every single running application or add-on service before doing the first shot. This includes everything in your system tray as well as Windows update (temporarily) as well as any other application updaters running in the background.

2. Install if in PA.c Format already, otherwise extract the app you will be regshotting to get it ready before doing the first regshot. This way the actual files added to your system won't show up. (Note For Local Apps: Do NOT run an application's standard local installer on the PC you will be testing on. If you can't extract the files with 7-Zip, install the app on a different PC and copy the operating files out of Program Files onto a flash drive and then move it to the PC you will be testing/regshotting on. Once you have run an app's installer or the app itself on a given PC, it can no longer be relied upon to produce an accurate regshot result.)

3. Do the first regshot

4. Start the app. Use it a bit. Open options and change some settings and save it. Use the file-open dialog and open a file. Then exit.

5. Do the second regshot

6. At this point, your regshot should be about under a page in Notepad++. If it's not, you may have something else messing things up on your system.

7. When you post your regshot results to a thread, use PRE tags. If it's bigger than a page on N++ and you still want to post it, please use pastebin.com for it and link to it.

depp.jones
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Make this sticky? Or add to

Make this sticky? Or add to the forum guidelines? Smile
I was looking for these guidelines and found them by searching (but I knew they existed). I consider it useful, too and placing it more prominent could perhaps help eleminating these issues.

yours,
dj

Stevoisiak
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Installer regestry

What if there is an installer? Shouldn't you regshot before you install it, since the installer may add registry entries?

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scriptdaemon
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Oops.

Nevermind. Brain fart.

John T. Haller
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No

We don't care what an installer does, since portable apps NEVER use the installer. You should install it on another PC and just bring the files or extract the files out of the installer.

This is a guide for testing portability of apps themselves. That's why it says install (if PAF) or extract.

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Stevoisiak
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Thanks

Thanks for clearing that up.

I always thought you ran regedit first. I've been doing it wrong for some time.

Just one thing though. Don't some installers add registry files that are needed to run the app?

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John T. Haller
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Rarely

This occurs very rarely. Most installers add keys that are not required (file associations). Keys that are, are typically added by the app itself if not present.

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The MAZZTer
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If they do you will figure it

If they do you will figure it out rather quickly because the app will refuse to run or will not work properly if run on a system it is not installed on. I have seen apps crash on startup with nonsensical error messages when they are missing their install-time data. In that case you would want to capture the install-time changes and experiment to figure out the minimal registry entries it needs to work.

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Pyromaniac
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Sandboxie?

...install the app on a different PC and copy the operating files out of Program Files onto a flash drive and then move it to the PC you will be testing/regshotting on.

I just use Sandboxie for that.

Is that bad/not recommended?

John T. Haller
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Not Recommended

Regshot (preferably in a VM like VirtualBox) is the official testing method and what we ultimately use to determine portability. We wouldn't promote Sandboxie for this purpose due to it being closed source commercial software.

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dagardner
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Services

Which services should be turned off? I'm not sure what you mean by "extra services".

I set my VM to use Diagnostic Setup (using msconfig), but when I did that, Hedgewars wouldn't run. I don't know if the missing service was specific to Hedgewars, or there was a general service that was missing.

Thanks,

Andy

John T. Haller
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Default

Basically, anything other than the default setup. But then you disable automatic updates for Windows itself and any apps that may run their updater in the background.

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