L
Lagomorph Mom
Dell Inspiron 6000 Laptop, Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1.73GHz, 1 GB RAM,
51 GB Hard Disk, OEM version of MS Windows XP Media Edition 5.1.2600 - SP 3
I know I've been very, very bad but I edited the registry w/o backing up the
system and now, am frightened to reboot. After reading recent posts about
staying out of the registry, I subscribed to this forum to find out if what I
deleted will affect rebooting. Yes - after the damage is done.
In the past 6 months, purely out of boredom while recovering from surgery,
I've installed, played & uninstalled over 100 online games from dozens of
websites purchasing only 6 licenses. After uninstalling the unwanted games,
I assumed my hard drives' byte value would return to the size it was before I
installed the game. Well...it didn't. Tracking files from
Trymedia-ACTIVEmark plus user pref & config files for each game remained in
Program File folders, Docs & Settings for both all users & my own folder, and
some Start Up folders. Even though I uninstalled the games from Add/Remove
Programs & deleted the user pref files through Windows Explorer, it recovered
only a half to three-quarters of the disk space before the games were
installed. I had to Defrag three times due to remnants of these games
scattered all over the place. Sadly, this is where I had the epiphany of
removing the remaining garbage using regedit as misguided as I was after
reading threads on the forum.
The keys and directories I removed from the registry trees were only under
the game developer directories in LOCAL_MACHINE & CURRENT_CONFIG. I left the
game developer directories alone, the games with purchased licenses and did
not touch ANY of the Windows system files. After removing about a dozen
keys, I got skiddish and came here. Now, I'm scared to reboot.
Since I didn't touch any Windows data, can I reboot or do I need to have my
hard drive re-imaged by Dell?
MB
(anxious & embarrassed)
51 GB Hard Disk, OEM version of MS Windows XP Media Edition 5.1.2600 - SP 3
I know I've been very, very bad but I edited the registry w/o backing up the
system and now, am frightened to reboot. After reading recent posts about
staying out of the registry, I subscribed to this forum to find out if what I
deleted will affect rebooting. Yes - after the damage is done.
In the past 6 months, purely out of boredom while recovering from surgery,
I've installed, played & uninstalled over 100 online games from dozens of
websites purchasing only 6 licenses. After uninstalling the unwanted games,
I assumed my hard drives' byte value would return to the size it was before I
installed the game. Well...it didn't. Tracking files from
Trymedia-ACTIVEmark plus user pref & config files for each game remained in
Program File folders, Docs & Settings for both all users & my own folder, and
some Start Up folders. Even though I uninstalled the games from Add/Remove
Programs & deleted the user pref files through Windows Explorer, it recovered
only a half to three-quarters of the disk space before the games were
installed. I had to Defrag three times due to remnants of these games
scattered all over the place. Sadly, this is where I had the epiphany of
removing the remaining garbage using regedit as misguided as I was after
reading threads on the forum.
The keys and directories I removed from the registry trees were only under
the game developer directories in LOCAL_MACHINE & CURRENT_CONFIG. I left the
game developer directories alone, the games with purchased licenses and did
not touch ANY of the Windows system files. After removing about a dozen
keys, I got skiddish and came here. Now, I'm scared to reboot.
Since I didn't touch any Windows data, can I reboot or do I need to have my
hard drive re-imaged by Dell?
MB
(anxious & embarrassed)