Number 249 - February 2004

Sarah's Windows Tweak: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Registry
by Sarah Lane with Tom Merritt Sarah gives us the lowdown on what makes up the mystical world of the Registry.
I show a lot of Registry hacks. But if you don't feel familiar with the Registry and its components, you won't benefit from many of my tweaks. I won't stand for that!!! On this show, I want to make you comfortable enough to manipulate the Registry four ways from Sunday.    O'Reilly's put together an excellent page http://hacks.oreilly.com/pub/h/658 at its website that explains the details of how the Registry works. That's a good place to brush up before you watch this show. I also highly recommend the accompanying book, "Windows XP Hacks."    If you don't have time to dive into that article, let me fill you in on the basics. Registry divided into hives    The Registry is divided into five areas called hives. The hives themselves are stored in the C:\Windows\system32\config and C:\Documents and Settings\{username} files. The five Registry hives HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT    This mostly contains information about file types and file name extensions. It tells XP how to handle the different file types and which user interface options to use. HKEY_USERS    Here's where the system keeps information about every user on the system. HKEY_CURRENT_USER    This hive contains system setup info for the machine's current user. This includes things such as desktop preferences, printers, and security settings. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE    This hive stores information about the computer itself and the hardware attached to it, such as keyboards, storage, and such. HKEY_CURRENT_CONFIG    Here's the hive that keeps current hardware configurations during the active session. Using keys and values    Underneath each hive are keys that can contain subkeys, and those subkeys can have subkeys, and so on and so on.    Keys and subkeys contain values. That's how the Registry controls things. Change the values and you change the thing the key controls.	O'Reilly uses this key as an example. HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Mouse\DoubleClickSpeed    It controls the time between clicks that determines whether something is a double-click or not. You have to edit the key's value to change the time. Editing a Registry key's value    Here are the five primary data types in a Registry.     REG_SZ (string value) -- numbers and text     REG_MULTI_SZ (string array value) -- numbers and text you can edit but not create     REG_EXPAND_SZ (expanded string value) -- usually points to the location of files     REG_BINARY (binary values) -- binary data     REG_DWORD (DWORD values) -- a hexadecimal data type To edit the Registry, use the Registry Editor    OK, time again to warn you. Don't play with the Registry unless you know what you're doing. You can really mess stuff up. To run the Registry Editor, go to the Run box in Windows and type "regedit" (without quotes), then press Enter.    The Registry Editor works like Windows Explorer. Changes you make take effect either right away or after a reboot. Keep in mind though that every change you make is permanent. There's no undo button. Did we mention being careful? Be careful!    A good trick when you're searching for a particular key is to use the find command. Press Ctrl + F to launch it.    Again, for all the details, visit the O'Reilly article http://hacks.oreilly.com/pub/h/658 we mentioned at the top of this piece.    Lastly, if you don't understand the title of this article, please rent this www.imdb.com/title/tt0057012/.    Until next time, happy tweaking!    sarah
Number 249 - February 2004