Chapter 7: Registry Key Reference

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

The everyday tasks of system administrators are extremely difficult; they need to manage all the hardware, operating systems, and applications installed on the 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 and Windows XP 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/2000/XP operating systems and emphasizes the new keys that have been added to Windows XP, the system administrator can greatly benefit from it.

 

Like many other Windows XP system components, the Registry is very similar to the Windows NT/2000 registry, and has significant differences from the Windows 9x/ME registry. This is due to the fact that Windows XP is based on the Windows NT/2000 kernel. However, because of new functionality that was first introduced with Windows XP, and of enhancements introduced into the Windows XP kernel, there appeared new registry keys and value entries. This is not surprising, since all new features must be reflected in the registry.