Chapter 7: Software Settings in the Registry

Overview

Put up in a place where it's easy to see the cryptic admonishment

--T.T.T.

When you feel how depressingly slowly you climb, it's well to remember that Things Take Time.

--Piet Hein
Grooks

Every day, system administrators have to engage in extremely difficult tasks; they need to manage all the hardware, operating systems, and applications installed on their organization's computers. They often need to administer the registry as well. A very short description of the root registry keys existing in Windows NT/2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003 registries was provided in Chapter 1. This chapter considers the topic in more detail. Since it was written as a brief reference on the main registry keys existing in all Windows NT-based operating systems and emphasizes the new keys that have been added to Windows XP and products of the Windows Server 2003 family, system administrators can greatly benefit from it.

Note 

Note Like many other system components, the registry is very similar to the Windows NT/2000 registry, due to the fact that Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 are based on the Windows NT/2000 kernel. However, because of new functionality and kernel enhancements, introduced with newer versions, new registry keys and value entries have appeared. This is not surprising, since all new features must be reflected in the registry.