Can Windows 8 Survive without the Registery

Ever since Microsoft Windows President Steven Sinofsky declared,

“Windows 8 re-imagines Windows”

I’ve been pondering the unimaginable: Windows without the Registry. Let’s forget the alternative processor platforms and Windows tablets. Those are all well and good, but nothing will rock the Windows world more than a retiring of that massive, hiearchical sub-system list that tells Windows about every application, component, and bit of hardware that runs on it.

What’s the Registry? Here’s one of Microsoft’s definitions. It was written about the Registry that ran inside Windows 2000, but the Registry in Windows 7 operates in pretty much the same way:-

"A central hierarchical database used in Microsoft Windows 98, Windows CE, Windows NT, and Windows 2000 used to store information that is necessary to configure the system for one or more users, applications and hardware devices" 

The Registry contains information that Windows continually references during operation, such as profiles for each user, the applications installed on the computer and the types of documents that each can create, property sheet settings for folders and application icons, what hardware exists on the system, and the ports that are being used. The Registry replaces most of the text-based .ini files that are used in Windows 3.x and MS-DOS configuration files, such as the Autoexec.bat and Config.sys.” 

When Sinofsky first introduced Windows 7 in 2008 and spoke of the need for the Registry, he called it a fascinating topic and a hard problem.

“It is metadata about everything on the subsystem, and it needs to go somewhere” 

he explained. At the first Windows 8 unveiling last June at D9, there was little mention of the Registry, only a promise that the next version of Windows would work with all the stuff Windows 7 currently handles. To do so, usually means you have a massive database of information in the subsystem that Windows 8 can access at any time to run your, say, five-year-old inkjet printer or Windows Vista-friendly app. 

So the Registry has to stay, right? Not necessarily.

Windows 8’s Hyper-V built in virtualization capability could finally transform Windows into the lean, mean operating system it was meant to be. If you can virtualize any operating system—even Windows 95 and most definitely Windows XP—then couldn’t you run anything that ran on those platforms without the need for the legacy data tables? Maybe.


The Registry also handles user information, but I have never liked how Windows handles users and where it stores all of our critical data (the tiny C: drive or partition, really?) and would not mind some wholesale changes there. What if Windows 8 puts just a little bit of user info in very small system files, but stores most of the rich details in the cloud? It’s what Google’s Chrome OS does right now and, honestly, it does not suck. Having user info in the cloud means you can go from Windows 8 to Windows 8 machine and pick up where you left off, without having to reestablish a local profile.

Microsoft wants more people to use its cloud-based services, and this could encourage its adoption. Obviously, there are users who will not want their profiles in the cloud. For them the Registry can build up slowly to encompass only the products they actively use and install and to support various system users’ data files. Windows 8, though, should always offer the option of store files (and more) in the Microsoft cloud.


Even if the Registry does exist on some level in Windows 8, it can shrink and grow dynamically, downloading from the cloud only those pieces of information it needs at the moment. For applications, I think this could be quite useful. Instead of allowing their products to fall slowly out of step with the OS and whatever other updates the user has made to the system, software vendor and their servers can talk to the system during application load and let the software pull down micro updates. If the system isn’t online (are we ever offline?), the application will function fine and alert the user to any update-related issues, reminding them to get online and access the mini updates at their first available opportunity.


On the hardware side, Windows 8 only needs info for the hardware that currently connected to it. The system already recognizes the printer the moment you plug it in and automatically installs the necessary drivers. Often times, Windows is getting the latest driver from the cloud anyway. Older printers may still crave the Registry, but I’m hoping that Windows 8 will only download the portion necessary to communicate with your parallel port-based printer.


I asked Microsoft about a world without a Windows Registry, but they weren’t ready to share any new info, or at least prior to the upcoming Build Conference where just maybe they’ll say, “The Registry is dead!”. When I talked to software vendors about the possibility, they expressed some concern about legacy apps and how they’d be able to talk to the new OS (hence the need for virtualization). Otherwise, every software application would have to be rebuilt to work with Windows 8—that is not going to happen. If Registry calls go away for good, application vendors could go inside their application code and do a search and replace for Registry calls, but I still think this translates to a near complete rewrite of many if not all applications.


Microsoft’s need to please 400 million legacy Windows users may make Registry retirement impossible, but I believe that even those who insist on using outdated software and hardware understand that it’s time for Windows to move forward. I’m not sure it can truly do that with the Registry in tow.