Hi, I have this HP laptop with Windows 10 installed, and I realized that the SYSTEM registry hive is huge: 85MB (on my desktop it is only 15MB) and I have found that the culprit is this registry key related to the Synaptics touch pad (I think): HKLM\SYSTEM\DriverDatabase\DriverPackages\synpd.inf_amd64_62fc09c761e44bc6\Configurations (inside there are keys with names like HP_GROUP8_PS2_Inst) it has 141960 subkeys and 782294 values, and exporting it to a reg file results in a 180MB file. Anyone knows what is this? Is it necessary? Any chance of get rid of it?
Mine is 259 MB in my Windows 10 laptop. I just leave it alone. It looks like they are related to your Synaptics touch pad driver I'd leave it alone. It might cause problems with your touch pad
Hi, thanks for answering. Do you have that key too? Have you found where does your SYSTEM registry stores that amount of data? My laptop is brand new and my SYSTEM hive is not fragmented. It's size is "real". Maybe yours is fragmented and you can reduce its size with a registry defragmenter? Anyway I think it's ridiculous that a driver stores that amount of data in the registry.
No, but "synpd.inf" is related to synaptics driver. I don't bother too much with the registry except to use the Registry cleaner in CCleaner to tidy up. I do not defragment my Registry--it caused problems for me in the past. Touch pad drivers are usually big.
I don't usually defrag my registry, only when it is really needed (like more than 30%), and always offline, and with a safe tool like sysinternals ru.exe. But I usually keep track of my registry fragmentation with my favorite registry editor (Registry Workshop), cause programs that writes and deletes a lot in the registry like portable programs, which I use a lot, may cause eventually, a big and fragmented registry. I'll keep searching for a solution to this. Maybe it is HP related problem and the generic synaptics drivers does not have this huge registry key. Cause I think it's not the same for the OS to load a 15MB registry hive than a 100MB registry hive.
Should not be a problem as Windows will never load the whole Hive into RAM. It only loads and caches accessed keys, thus the dormant parts will never be loaded.
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Hi, I've made some tests on Windows 10, copying a huge key and removing it several times into HKLM\SOFTWARE and HKLM\SYSTEM, to make those two hives very fragmented and big (Registry Workshop showed me 80% could be defragmented), cause I realized I never had to defrag the registry in my Windows 10 computer, but in my Windows 7 desktop I usually do it twice a year. Then I checked twice a day the registry fragmentation, and after two days I found that the hives fragmentation was 0% again and their size was the original. So Windows 10 defrags the registry automatically when it is needed. I think this is a very good improvement.