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.