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The Windows 95 Registry: A Survival Guide for Users
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About The Windows 95 Registry: A Survival Guide For Users
Product description "Clear writing, informative graphics, and a well thought-out focus make this the Registry book of choice for power users."PC Magazine If you need to locate sources of problems, customize your Windows 95 computer, or just want to better understand how your computer is organized, then you need to work with the Registry. Unfortunately, the Windows 95 Registry brings the era of black-box computing back to life. And, despite all its power, flexibility, and immense capacity for causing problems. Microsoft provides little if any support for the Registry. It truly takes an expert at your side to safely navigate through the maze of HKEYS, subkeys, data strings, and programming pitfalls. The Windows 95 Registry is your guided tour into the depths of the Windows 95 Registry. Read it carefully before you open the hood, for Microsoft's own cautions about the Registry must be taken very seriously. Altering Registry information can damage your system configuration beyond the point of a simple repair by re-booting. With John Woram at your side, you can proceed with confidence and easily fix whatever Windows 95 throws your way. http://www.idgbooks.com Detailed information from an expert source Complete roadmap to the six HKEYs Troubleshoot and repair a corrupted Registry file Export and edit the Registry safely Customize Windows 95 through the Registry Find and change Registry keys with RegEdit Survive Plug-and-Play disasters Remove keys from deleted installations Amazon.com Review The Windows 95 Registry isn't just for professional system administrators. John Woram's The Windows 95 Registry: A Survival Guide for Users provides an excellent end-user's introduction to the registry, how to work with it, and what it can do for you. The book kicks off with two hefty chapters that provide detailed information on the structure and purpose of each registry key and an introduction to Regedit, the registry editor. This is potentially dry stuff, but the author makes clear the practical purpose of each key and why you would want to know about it. The next chapter goes into far more detail on using Regedit for customizing Windows 95, with a concentration on customizing the look and behavior of the Windows shell. Following is a section that details the instructions for backing up, restoring, and comparing registry versions. This section is oddly placed and readers will want to absorb the information it presents before attempting the practical examples in the previous chapter. Two detailed chapters on troubleshooting a corrupt registry and interpreting registry error messages round out the book. Professionals will probably want a tutorial that concentrates more on hardware, networking, and user administration aspects of the registry. However, this book gives power users what they want most--a clear overview and detailed instructions for shell customization and troubleshooting. About the Author JOHN WORAM is a Senior Contributing Editor at Windows magazine, where he writes the monthly "Optimizing Windows" column. He is the author of the extremely successful PC Configuraion Handbook, which sold over 250,000 copies and been translated into six foreign languages. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. This section offers definitions of a few terms unique to the Registry. Because there are not that many of them, the definitions are listed here in the order in which they are likely to be encountered, rather than in the usual alphabetical sequence. Additional terms are defined in the chapters in which they are first used. The Registry: Windows 95 writes much of its configuration information into the hidden SYSTEM.DAT and USER.DAT files, which are found in the C:\Windows folder. If the system is configured for multiple users, a separate USER.DAT file is created for each user, and each such file is found in the user's own custom Profiles area, as described in more detail in the "Custom Profiles" section of Chapter 4. These DAT files are referred to collectively as The Registry. Registry Editor: The Registry Editor is the Windows 95 utility used to edit the Registry's SYSTEM.DAT and USER.DAT files. For routine configuration changes, the Registry is automatically edited whenever the user makes changes via the Control Panel or from some other Windows 95 applet or application. Alternatively, the Registry's may be directly edited as described in Chapters 3 and 4. In conventional INI file viewing, it is always clear which file is open, because the user must load that file into an Edit utility, where its name appears in the editor's Title Bar. By contrast, the Registry Editor loads data contained in the two DAT files but does not identify either file by name. NOTE: Any change made via the Registry Editor takes place immediately, and the new information is written into SYSTEM.DAT or USER.DAT, as appropriate. The usual Save File operation is not required, and in fact is not possible. In order to undo a change, the appropriate line must be re-edited. HKEY: The Registry is divided into six sections, each identified as HKEY_SectionName, which immediately raises the question, what's an HKEY? In Microspeak, it is the programming handle to a key (hence, HKEY) in which configuration information is stored. Key: A key is the Registry analog to the folder (formerly, directory) seen in the Windows 95 Explorer. In fact, a folder icon appears next to each of the six HKEYs in the Registry. Subkey: Again following the Explorer model, a boxed plus sign to the immediate left of a Registry key indicates there are one or more subkeys (analogous to subfolders) contained within the adjacent key. Each subkey may contain its own subkeys, and so on for several levels. Like the six HKEYs, each subkey is represented by a folder icon. Key vs. Subkey: Because every HKEY and many subkeys lead to one or more additional subkeys, a tendency to describe the subkey, subsubkey, subsubsubkey, and so on must be avoided if at all possible. Accordingly, after any subkey has been introduced, it may subsequently be referred to as a key, while a key immediately below it is referred to as a subkey, until it becomes the focus of the discussion. Subkey Level: In a few cases, a key leads to a subkey with the same name, which may in turn lead to another subkey--again with the same name, as shown by the example in Figure 1.2. If it is necessary to clearly differentiate one such key from another, it may be necessary to refer to the level at which it appears in the key\subkey structure. The figure illustrates a worst-case example, in which a level-5 .Default key leads to a level-6 .Default key, which leads to a level-7 .Default key. As shown in the figure, My Computer is at level 0, the six HKEYs are at level 1, and the subkeys are at level 2 or greater. Verb: For reasons that are not entirely clear, the Microspeak Dictionary defines the type of action that can be performed on an object as a verb. Two common verbs are play and edit. The typical use for an object is called the primary verb. Double-clicking an object usually executes the action specified by the primary verb. Other verbs are secondary verbs. Many objects support only one verb.
