Registry Management Tools

Registry Management Tools

Hundreds of third-party and shareware registry tools are available. You learn about many of them throughout this book. The following list introduces some of the tools I use most often:

• Microsoft Registry Editor.

  You learn about Registry Editor in Chapter 2 , “Using Registry Editor.” This is the primary tool you use to edit settings in the registry.

• Microsoft Console Registry Tool for Windows (Reg.exe).

  This command-line registry tool supports most of the capabilities of Registry Editor. This tool is significant because it allows you to script registry edits in batch files. For more information about Reg.exe, see Chapter 11, “Scripting Registry Changes.”

• Microsoft WinDiff.

  This tool comes with the Windows Support Tools, which you install from \Support\Tools on the Windows installation CD. It's the best program I've found for comparing files, a useful technique for tracking down settings in the registry. For more information about using this tool, see Chapter 10, “Finding Registry Settings.”

• Microsoft Word 2003.

  This application might not seem like a registry management tool, but when WinDiff isn't available, I use Word to compare files so I can figure out where a program stores a setting in the registry. I also use Word to edit scripts so that I can take advantage of its built-in version control and revision-tracking features.

If you used the Microsoft Windows 2000 Resource Kit tools to manage Windows, you probably noticed the absence of tools from the Microsoft Windows XP Re source Kit. The Microsoft Windows XP Resource Kit CD contains only a copy of the kit's documentation. This is partially because Windows XP includes many of these tools, as do the Windows Support Tools. (These are on your Windows XP installation CD in \Support \Tools.) Most of the Microsoft Windows 2000 Resource Kit tools still work well in Windows XP, and you can download many of them from Microsoft's Web site at http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/techinfo/reskit/tools/default.asp.

NOTE
If you're looking for a particular tool not discussed in this book, you can find it easily. Navigate to the ZDNet Downloads site at http://downloads-zdnet.com.com in Microsoft Internet Explorer, and then search for registry in the Windows category. The result is a list of hundreds of registry tools with a wide variety of special features, such as search and replace. Make sure that any program you download works with Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, though.