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I use win_xp_sp3 inside my virtualbox i was mapped all the xp folder destination into my host machine in regedit. and now i need to change the my username and i don't remember all files i changed. is there any possibility on regedit find and replace?

5 Answers 5

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There are a few paid products out there (with with free trial periods), for example:

For a 'free' option you can try:

  1. Exporting search results from RegScanner
  2. Use a text editor to search and replace in the exported .reg file
  3. Import the updated .reg file to update the registry.

Just remember to backup your registry before you do anything! :)

Something like ERUNT should help for the backup.

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  • Thank you fro your replay the first one works to replace manually but the funny thing is after restarting windows the registry is still there. may be this is another question.
    – Achu
    Apr 20, 2011 at 11:38
  • First one is not free and second one has been "deleted". :)
    – Mrchief
    Oct 22, 2015 at 14:51
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The best, free one out there - Registry Finder

Hosted on its own HTTPS page, so it doesn't look that much of a security risk to me as others that can be only downloaded from sourceforge.com or similar.

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  • 4
    why would someone's own server, without source code that can be verified, not be more of a security risk than a sourceforge release, which has the code right there for anyone to audit? Even if no one ever does, a release on an source hub is by definition more secure than a self-hosted precompiled binary. Jan 22, 2022 at 17:27
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    @Mike'Pomax'Kamermans I will tell you the simple reason that you could not comprehend. If someone had to fly a malware, they won't just keep it to hosting on their verified domain name - thye will try to publish it at as many places as possible. If it's on sourceforge, chances are someone could have bugged it for people to download under the same name. Same reason why you don't download MS Office from some random file hosting service and rather trust MS's own website for it Jan 25, 2022 at 4:08
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    That's an appeal to authority fallacy right there. Microsoft can be trusted because they suffer significant repercussions on poisoned releases (which has happened, and which we've seen the repercussions of). This is in stark contrast to a random single person giving something away for free, which we have no reason to trust. In your example, yes, we can (to a degree) trust MS. We cannot just trust the random user. They operate in completely different spheres of authority. Jan 25, 2022 at 16:04
  • The point was not the trustworthiness of the entity but the fact that any software product downloaded from not its original source can be relatively riskier than from their own page. As you yourself pointed out, MS had also made poisonous releases so the threat to an individual downloading always stays even from trusted authorities - no one reads the source code before downloading! - however, you can minimize the degree of this sufferance. Jan 30, 2022 at 16:54
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    Microsoft can't be trusted is the best thing I read in these comments.
    – Leathan
    Nov 3, 2023 at 1:39
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I stumbled across this free Advanced Regedit thing. Seems to work.

enter image description here

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    It doesn't look into all of the keys. I found more than 3.000 keys left behind. But still it was a good start.
    – MagTun
    May 7, 2017 at 6:28
  • Advanced Regedit seems not to have been updated since 2005, so I wouldn't expect it to handle a Win10 registry comprehensively.
    – pol098
    Feb 13, 2022 at 21:23
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Maybe a tad bit late, but now it's possible to script your way into registry with powershell. Once upon a time I did this bold move and reassigned another letter to one of my hard drives. There were some tools installed so here's how I replaced the paths.

# BACKUP YOUR REGISTRY before even thinking of copypasting and running this on your PC
# the person executing this script is the one and only responsible
# for any damage it may incur
# you've been warned
Get-ChildItem -Recurse 'Registry::HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT','Registry::HKEY_USERS','Registry::HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE','Registry::HKEY_CURRENT_CONFIG' |
  ForEach-Object {
    $key = $_
    Write-Verbose $key.Name -Verbose
    $key.property | ForEach-Object {
      $prop = $_
      $value = $key | Get-ItemPropertyValue -Name $prop
      if ($value -imatch '^("?)I(\:\\Tools\\.*)') {
        $replacement = "$($Matches[1])M$($Matches[2])"
        Write-Host "$key `:`n  ", $value," -> ","$replacement"
        Set-ItemProperty -Path "Registry::$key" -Debug -Name $prop -Value $replacement
      }
    }
  }

Limitations:

  • Not sure if the script is compatible with powershell version available on WinXP SP3 that OP was using.
  • My script looks for properties starting with the path I:\Tools, it doesn't look for properties where the path appears in the middle of the string. I'm too lazy to fix my regex and it was good enough for me.
  • The script purposefully asks for each replacement, which depending on your case might be hundreds of times. Resist the temptation to click "Yes to all". If you don't, I understand, but when everything breaks and you don't know what changed, don't blame me.
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Registry Toolkit

The free version can be used 50 times, it can do regular expressions.

enter image description here

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