ChangeAlyzer

Most important changes to your system are made in the form of registry entries, which is also the place which dictates general OS behavior. Poor management can lead to an unstable system, and with the help of specialized applications like ChangeAlyzer you can easily view what changes were made after specific operations.

The application takes you through a short and uneventful setup process so it can integrate and be able to read registry entries. Launching it needs to be done with administrator privileges, even though you’re using an elevated account.

It’s best to make a backup of the entire registry system to avoid any unexpected issues or accidents, even though the application itself doesn’t allow you to change any registry values. This needs to be done manually because there’s no such built-in option.

To be able to display changes, the application first needs to take a snapshot of the current state of registry entries. Heading over to the settings tab gives you the possibility to pick only specific hives, and whether to scan corresponding files, and on what drives, with options to add more to the list.

It can take a bit of time for the snapshot to be created, but this mostly depends on the health status and complexity of registry hives. Once a snapshot is created you don’t necessarily have to analyze changes on the spot, because there’s a high chance nothing is displayed.

Analysis can take a little while as well, since all content needs to be scanned again. Results are displayed in an intuitive table along with details like key, value name, and data before change. Several filters can be used to show added, deleted, or modified entries. Custom entries can be exported from the review tab.

All things considered, we can state that ChangeAlyzer is a practical application you can use as an advanced method of keeping your computer in good shape. No actual changes are made to registry entries by the program, while results are shown in an intuitive manner, with different filters to analyze only changes of interest.