Printing the Registry

Printing the Registry

Regedit has a feature that prints all or part of the registry. I confess that I've never printed anything in the registry; I just haven't found a good reason to do it. You can certainly print subkeys as a backup before making changes, but I tend to use hive files for that purpose, and this doesn't require me to retype keys, values, and data to restore the old settings. You might not get much use out of the print feature, but this chapter wouldn't be complete without describing how to use it. To print all or part of the registry, follow these steps:

1. Click the key you want to print, keeping in mind that you're going to print every subkey and value under it.

2. On the File menu, click Print to display the Print dialog box, shown in Figure 2-4.

3. Do one of the following:

   • To print the entire registry, select All.

   • To print the selected branch, select Selected Branch.

4. Click Print.

Figure 2-4 The format of Regedit's printer output is the same as the format that Regedit uses when exporting portions of the registry to a text file.

Listing 2-1 shows you what Regedit's printer output looks like. As you see, it's not very useful except maybe as a temporary way to remember values. Still, Microsoft greatly improved Regedit's printer output for Windows. Regedit now prints REG_DWORD values so they look like REG_DWORD values, rather than printing them as binary values in little-endian format. (See Chapter 1, “Learning the Basics.”) Regedit also prints binary values along with their ASCII-equivalent text. Finally, this version of Regedit actually prints each value's type so that you don't have to flip through pages to figure it out.

Listing 2-1 Sample Printer Output

     Key Name:     HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\Setup      Class Name:    <NO CLASS>      Last Write Time:  1/2/2002 - 1:16 AM      Value 0       Name:      SetupType       Type:      REG_DWORD       Data:      0x0      Value 1       Name:      SystemSetupInProgress       Type:      REG_DWORD       Data:      0x0      Value 2       Name:      CmdLine       Type:      REG_SZ       Data:            Value 3       Name:      SystemPrefix       Type:      REG_BINARY       Data:            00000000  cd 03 00 00 00 80 3c d2 - Í.....<Ò      Value 4       Name:      SystemPartition       Type:      REG_SZ       Data:      \Device\HarddiskVolume1      Value 5       Name:      OsLoaderPath       Type:      REG_SZ       Data:      \