Registry Live Watch is a free portable program for Microsoft Windows devices. The primary purpose of the program is to monitor a Registry key for changes.

I stumbled upon the program on Major Geeks today. It is quite old; the release dates back to the year 2009. The fact that it has not been updated for years means that it is abandoned by its developer and that you should not expect updates for it.

Still, Registry Live Watch works fine on any supported version of Windows, and even on systems running the unsupported Windows XP and Vista operating systems.

Registry Live Watch

Registry Live Watch displays all options on a single page. You set the Registry key that you want the program to monitor at the top, and make other modifications afterward.

The program supports all major root keys and requires that you add the key that you want to monitor in the format Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer.

You have two options to customize the monitoring:

1. Change what you want to monitor.
2. Define an action.

The program monitors the selected key for any modification by default and writes these events to a log file.

You can monitor keys, values, or security instead. This is useful in certain scenarios, for instance when you want to make sure that a specific key is not changed, or that security permissions are not changed.

Registry Live Watch can pop up a message or execute a program instead as well. The option to execute a program on change is quite handy. You can run executable files or batch scripts, for instance, to revert any change to a value immediately.

The program needs to run for the monitoring. A click on start monitor starts the process, and you can minimize the program to the System Tray afterward. The application uses roughly 6 Megabytes of RAM when minimized and monitoring.

The only other option that you have is to save the log file to the system.

Closing Words

Registry Live Watch is a handy portable program for Windows. It is abandoned by its developer but works fine even on modern versions of the operating system that Microsoft released after the year 2009.

The main limitation of it is that it monitors a single key only. If you need to monitor multiple keys and Registry hives, try a software like RegistryChrangesView by Nirsoft, Registry Alert, or RegFromApp.