Chapter 4: Hacking the Registry

Overview

This chapter covers hacking the registry to make Microsoft Windows XP look and feel the way you want. Rather than showing you how Windows XP organizes the registry, which is covered in the chapters in Part IV, "Appendices," I'll show you the brute force hacks that immediately change the way you use Windows XP. To make these customizations easier, I've included scripts for many of them. Download these and new scripts at http://www.honeycutt.com.

I use the term hack loosely. These aren't security hacks or hacks that give you more features than you're supposed to have. By no means am I helping you hack product activation. These are hacks that help you customize the operating system in ways that you can't through its user interface. For example, this chapter helps you customize the shortcut menus and the icons you see in the user interface and change how Windows XP behaves. It even describes how you can automatically log on to Windows XP, bypassing the Log On To Windows dialog box. You'll find some of these hacks on various Web sites and FAQs, but hopefully I'm giving you many new ones that you won't find anywhere else.

These hacks are for power users. If you're looking for customizations with an IT flavor, see Chapter 15, "Working Around IT Problems," which has customizations that help IT professionals deploy Windows XP and solve particular IT problems. But even though the chapter you're reading now is end user-oriented, IT professionals might find that its customizations are a good fit for their enterprise users, and professionals can deploy those customizations in a variety of ways, including default user profiles, policies, and scripts. For example, IT professionals frequently ask me how to simulate IntelliMirror features like Folder Redirection without using policies, and the first hack shows you how to do just that.