Ever wonder how many pages it would take to print out the Registry in Windows XP? Really? Me too.
Well, today I was talking to a customer while making some registry changes, and the topic of just how big the registry is came up. After hours I decided to export the registry of my corporate Windows XP SP2 desktop machine to a TXT file (139 MB). Then I tried to open that registry.txt file with Microsoft Word 2007. The result?
How many pages is that?
32,767 pages of plain text, and it died.
Just for giggles, I decided to try and open the same 139 MB TXT file in the PortableApps version of OpenOffice.org Writer running on a USB flash drive.
The result?
Windows XP was not amused.
But you know what? Writer actually got further than Word:
38,306 pages. Actually, it was 38,307 pages, but when I tried to change the 3/4" margins to 1" margins to see if it would increase the number of pages, it dropped down to 38,306 and threw the fault error in the status bar.
So, if a page is 11" long / 63,360 inches in a mile = 5,750 pages per mile.
Basically, we’re at 6.6 miles long, and that’s not even the complete registry.
Update: I actually got OpenOffice Writer to reach 39,721 pages before it ran out of virtual memory. Anyway, enough fun for now.