RegScanner is another nifty NirSoft tool that allows you to search the Windows Registry more conveniently than with the built-in regedit utility. The main difference is that RegScanner's displays all found entries immediately and you don't have to jump from hit to hit. This display method is much more efficient than regedit's, particularly if RegScanner finds many entries for your search term, because you can skim quickly over the search results without having to press the F3 key until your fingers go numb.
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Search Windows Registry
Perhaps even more interesting is that RegScanner offers some very useful search options. For instance, you can limit your search to keys that were modified within a certain time range. This is helpful if you installed a program recently and you only want to find Registry keys that belong to this program.
Moreover, you can limit your search to specific base keys (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, HKEY_CURRENT_USER, etc.) and to Registry types (REG_SZ, REG_DWORD, etc.). Also useful is that RegScanner can show the values that belong to keys that contain the search term. You can also restrict the search results to show only keys (no values).
Find Windows Registry entries
What I like about RegScanner is that you can launch another search within the found entries. This is helpful with complex search patterns—for example, if you have to narrow your search to entries of a specific vendor.
Edit Windows Registry
Once you found the Registry entry, you can edit it in regedit by pressing F8 or through RegScanner's context menu. This distinguishes RegScanner from the Registry editor RegAlyzer, which I reviewed a while back. RegScanner is merely a Registry search tool and not a Registry editor.
Delete Registry entries
However, you can delete Registry entries (keys/values) conveniently with RegScanner. The Registry search tool allows you to mark entries in the result window by clicking them while pressing the CTRL key. You can then delete the entries in one go. This feature comes in handy if you want to quickly get rid of the Registry entries of a certain application.
Export Registry entries
You probably know that you can export Windows Registry entries with regedit to .reg files, which you can then import on another machine. You can also do this in RegScanner. However, this nifty Registry search tool also allows you to select multiple Registry entries in the results pane and then export them into one .reg file. You can also copy multiple entries to the Windows clipboard or to a text file.
I tested RegScanner v1.82.
I use the combination of RegSeeker and RegScanner when it comes to cleaning the Registry of bad mojo. The fact that both are portable makes for a nifty Registry Tag Team.
RegSeeker looks nice too. Will have a look at it soon.
Where did you hide the button to download registry
scanner on your web page? Thanks.
Jeff, you have to download the software from the publisher’s page. The link is at the end of the article.
I could scan the registry for a particular string but could not delete them using regscanner.Plz Help
I need to clean thousands of Autodesk entries, it found only 37. No good for a huge clean out.