Examining the Registry

Because the Registry is made up of many files, Windows comes with a utility to view and modify them: the Registry Editor. The Registry Editor comprises two panes, as shown in Figure E.1.

Figure E.1. The Registry Editor contains two panes of information.

The left pane shows the Registry tree with the top-level name, My Computer, at the top. There are subtrees, also known as hives, under this branch. The names of the hives are the same in both Windows 2000 and Windows XP. Expand a hive by clicking on the plus sign to the left of the hive name. You can expand the hive to view all of its keys. Each key can have one or many subkeys, and each key or subkey can have one or many values associated with it. Most keys contain several levels of subkeys along with one or many values.

When you select a key or subkey, the right pane of the Registry Editor shows all the values that are contained within that key or subkey. The status bar at the bottom of the Registry Editor contains the complete path to the selected subkey. Two columns of information are displayed in the right-side column: the name and the value of each item under the selected key or subkey. Perusing the various keys in the Registry will quickly show you that most of the values aren't easily comprehensible. Much of the data stored in the Registry is stored in hexadecimal format. No definitive list of Registry key values is published, although much information can be found on the Internet if you're curious about a particular value's meaning.

TIP

The Registry can be a very powerful tool to help manage Windows. It can also be a very dangerous one. If you aren't completely sure what you're doing when modifying the Registry, it's very easy to make a mistake and corrupt the entire Registry file. For that reason, consider investing in a book entirely on the Windows Registry if you would like to know more about it. One book of particular of interest is Windows 2000 Registry Handbook, by Jerry Honeycutt, published by Que.