Simple Informations

This post is a brief introduction to the Windows ® Registry. Most of us have already heard about the Registry. Some may have detailed knowledge of it while some may not even have known its existence. This post is for those who are novices and also those who doesn’t know much about the registry.

Windows Help and Support gives this info about Registry

Windows stores its configuration information in a database called the registry. (The registry editor that ships with Windows is regedit.exe.) The registry contains profiles for each user of the computer and information about system hardware, installed programs, and property settings. Windows continually references this information during its operation.

You can edit the registry by using an inbuilt Windows Component named the “Registry Editor”. The registry editor can be found in the C:\Windows\ folder.

There is a >My Computer item which can be expanded into mainly five divisions . The divisions are HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT, HKEY_CURRENT_USER, HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, HKEY_USERS, HKEY_CURRENT_CONFIG As the name indicates, different configurations are stored under this specific class names.

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HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT :

Abbreviated HKCR, HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT stores information about registered applications, such as Associations from File Extensions and OLE Object Class IDs tying them to the applications used to handle these items. On Windows 2000 and above, HKCR is a compilation of HKCU\Software\Classes and HKLM\Software\Classes. If a given value exists in both of the subkeys above, the one in HKCU\Software\Classes is used.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER :

Abbreviated HKCU, HKEY_CURRENT_USER stores settings that are specific to the currently logged-in user. The HKCU key is a link to the subkey of HKEY_USERS that corresponds to the user; the same information is reflected in both locations. On Windows-NT based systems, each user’s settings are stored in their own files called NTUSER.DAT and USRCLASS.DAT inside their own documents and settings subfolder.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE :

Abbreviated HKLM, HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE stores settings that are general to all users on the computer. On NT-based versions of Windows, HKLM contains four subkeys, SAM, SECURITY, SOFTWARE and SYSTEM, that are found within their respective files located in the %SystemRoot%\System32\Config folder. A fifth subkey, HARDWARE, is volatile and is created dynamically, and as such is not stored in a file. Information about system hardware drivers and services are located under the SYSTEM subkey, while the SOFTWARE subkey contains software and windows settings.

HKEY_USERS :

Abbreviated HKU, HKEY_USERS contains subkeys corresponding to the HKEY_CURRENT_USER keys for each user registered on the machine.

HKEY_CURRENT_CONFIG :

Abbreviated HKCC, HKEY_CURRENT_CONFIG contains information gathered at runtime; information stored in this key is not permanently stored on disk, but rather regenerated at boot time.

data courtesy - Wikipedia

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You can navigate to different Keys (folder icons) just like the way you do in other folder tree structures. In the forth coming posts on registry I will assume you can navigate through the menus easily.

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Tags: Introduction, Registry

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