Hello Jernej, You may work in a corporate environment, but half the world is not corporate. I include small businesses in that.
Configuration files are not written to that often, so your comment about flushing misuscule changes is irrelevent. I'd rather have a single conf file corrupted rather than the entire registry corrupted. However, I don't get your idea that conf or ini file corruption would be an everyday occurrance. If the registry doesn't get corrupted that often, why would individual files get corrupted any more frequently? One _major_ advantage to separate conf/ini files is that it can be much easier to migrate a software package from one system to another. And why is it difficult to control programs from a central location with separate files? If all the conf files are stored in a single directory (such as /etc on Unix/Linux), I don't see any difference. You can consider the individual files as a database, with each table stored in a separate file, if you like. Regarding breakage, I do agree that these days, the majority of incidents are caused by spyware. But because of the registry, the spyware is more likely to cause other damage in the registry. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a fanatic about Linux vs. Windows. I use Windows every day, even though my main job currently is a Linux administrator. Windows is, at present, the best OS for a desktop, although several Linux distributions are catching up. Linux, on the other hand, is IMHO better at servers than Windows. I do recommend Windows when it is necessary and appropriate, and recommend Linux the same way JBB I will agree that it is much better than the days of 9x, but it Thursday, February 3, 2011, 6:39:12 AM, you wrote: > On Wednesday, February 2, 2011, 21:59:04, Jonathan Bayer wrote: >> Hello Jernej, >> Wednesday, February 2, 2011, 3:46:51 PM, you wrote: >>> Err, what's the point of Registry then? >> Something to hide parameters, configuration items, etc from the >> general user. It is fragile, and the system won't boot if it is >> broken. > Times of Windows 9x and it's fragile registry are long in the past. I > haven't seen registry corruption (that wasn't a direct result of > hardware failure) on Windows 2000 or newer. If everything that's > currently reading and writing the registry would use separate files > instead, your computer'd work either much slower (because everybody > would be flushing those minuscule changes in small files all the > time), or configuration file corruption would be an everyday > occurrence. > And while this isn't really important for home users, without Registry > you also lose the ability to control programs from a central location > (which is very important in corporate networks - you don't want the > admin to visit every machine, or write a separate script for every > program). >> IMHO, the registry is the worst thing about Windows. I can live with >> everything else, but the registry is the one thing that breaks windows >> more often than I can count. > Really? In my experience, by far the most often cause of Windows > breakage is various spyware, followed by dying hard drives, bad > drivers and bad RAM (but these three together don't account for even > half of the spyware cases). I don't remember when I last saw registry > corruption, and there's a lot of computers I deal with. -- Best regards, Jonathan mailto:jba...@bayerfamily.net ________________________________________________ Current version is 4.2.42 | 'Using TBUDL' information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
