Leon writes:

<<John Pennington writes about a "Registry Restore"  What is this and how does
it operate?>>

A registry restore will often solve those annoying little glitches that
build up with W95/98. Also handy when computer performance starts to drop
off. Over the 6 years I used W95B, a system of registry backups and
restores kept the computer up to peak speed with never a reformat. And
saved my bacon on many occasions. It's far easier than doing a Windows
reinstall (which, unless a new install, only copies most existing registry
faults anyway). Adopt a system of backing up the registry regularly, at a
time when everything is operating smoothly. Then you will have several
points to which you can return.  You may need to reinstall some of your
programs after restoring.

There are several ways of doing a backup.

1. The quickest and easiest way to back up the Registry involves using the
Registry Editor to export all or part of the Registry to a .reg file. This
information can then be restored to your system quite easily.
Open the Registry Editor--select Start, Run, type regedit and click OK.
Assuming you want to back up the entire Registry, select Registry, Export
Registry File, navigate to wherever you'd like to store the backup file and
type a name for the file. I use the month, so that you know which is which
when there are multiple backups. Select All under Export Range, then click
Save. The result is a .reg file in the location you specified.

To restore, just double-click the .reg file.

2. A better method is to use the free ERU (Emergency Recovery Utility) from
Microsoft. It's on the W95, but not the W98 disk. I've an idea it's
available on the PCSoft download archives. ERU automatically backs up the
registry plus vital system files. This is the system I've always used as it
does a more complete job and it's very quick and easy to use. To restore,
you have to boot into dos and "cd" to the folder containing the backup,
then run erd.exe. You'll need an elementary knowledge of dos to do this,
but it's pretty basic after the first time.

3. An alternative way of restoring the registry in Win 98 is to close to
dos. At the C: Prompt type: scanreg /restore. Then select the copy registry
you want to restore. Win 98 automatically retains copies of the last few
registries from each successful bootup. This is limited as W98 does not
retain older copies of the registry by default. You could probably
configure it to do so, but I've never used this method.

Registry backup and restore are not so necessary in ME or XP, as it's now
part of System Restore. Nevertheless, it's still not a bad idea, as it
saves doing a complete system restore. It's interesting to see that
Microsoft still have a free version of ERU available for XP---it's called
Erunt. And it has hardly changed from its old W95 days!

Don Penlington
 From the beach at Surfers Paradise.
http://www.geocities.com/donaldpen/
for sunny Queensland photos, fractal art, free computer tutorials, and more.
(Sorry, this site is down at the moment).

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