Occasionally, in books, articles, and conversations, you’ll hear hushed references to something called the Windows Registry—usually accompanied by either knowing or bewildered glances.
The Registry is your PC’s master database of preference settings. For example, most of the programs in the Control Panel are nothing more than graphic front ends that, behind the scenes, modify settings in the Registry.
The Registry also keeps track of almost every program you install, every peripheral device you add, every account you create, your networking configuration, and much more. If you’ve noticed that shortcut menus and Properties dialog boxes look different depending on what you’re clicking, you have the Registry to thank. It knows what you’re clicking and what options should appear as a result. In all, there are thousands and thousands of individual settings in your Registry.
As you can well imagine, therefore, the Registry is an extremely important cog in the Windows machine. That’s why Windows marks most of your Registry files as hidden and non-deletable, and why it makes a Registry backup every single time you shut down the PC. If the Registry gets randomly edited, a grisly plague of problems may descend upon your machine. Granted, System Restore can extract you from such a mess, but now you know why the Registry is rarely even mentioned to novices.
In fact, Microsoft would just as soon you not even know about the Registry. There’s not a word about it in the basic user guides, and about the only information you’ll find on it in the Help and Support center is a page that says, “Ordinarily, you do not need to make changes to the registry. The registry contains complex system information that is vital to your computer, and an incorrect change to your registry could render your computer inoperable.”
Still, the Registry is worth learning about. You shouldn’t edit it arbitrarily, but if you follow a step-by-step “recipe” from a book, magazine, Web site, or technical-help agent, you shouldn’t fear opening the Registry to make a few changes.
Why would you want to? Because there are lots of Windows settings that you can’t change in any other way, as you’ll see in the following pages.