How To Use Regedit

Windows stores its configuration settings in a database called the registry. These settings are constantly modified by the many different programs running in Windows. Users can also make changes to the registry by using the Windows registry editor, regedit. Making changes to the registry is a common way to correct problems and change the way Windows looks and acts.

However, making the wrong registry changes can cripple your Windows system. So before you start hacking away with regedit, you should learn a little about it. This tutorial will explain some of the features in regedit and tell you how to use it safely.

Backing up the registry

Back up the registry before you make changes. One convenient way to do this is to use Windows SystemRestore. Here’s how to use System Restore.. Make sure you understand of these methods before going any further.

Launching regedit

Unlike most other system tools, regedit will not appear in any of your menus when you click the Start button. That means you’ll have to launch it some other way. I’ll tell you how to start it using the Run dialog.

To bring up the Run dialog, hold down the Windows key and tap the R key.

Now type regedit into the command entry box and click OK.

Using Regedit

Once launched, regedit will pop up pretty quickly. Here’s what it looks like:

First, I’ll mention that you can see a “Help” menu in regedit and you’ll find plenty of information in it that I won’t cover in this tutorial.

The navigation pane (on the left) is showing the 5 main “hive” keys, which always start with the word HKEY. To navigate deeper into the registry, you need to click on the plus (+) signs next to a hive key. The same applies the further into registry you go. Once you click on a plus, it will display all the sub-keys under that key and the plus will change into a minus (-) sign. Clicking on the minus sign will collapse the structure back to the way it was.

In the view below, you can see that I’ve located the key for a piece of software that I had installed.

At the bottom of the window you can see the registry path to this key. Right clicking on a key will bring up a menu showing several actions.

• “New”, will create a new key under the key I have selected.


• “Delete” – If this was a program that was no longer installed on my PC, I could safely delete this key.


• The “Copy Key Name” action places the full path to the key in your Windows Clipboard, and it can be pasted as text into other applications, such as email or a web browser.


• “Export” action allows you to save the information under a registry key, and this information can be restored later if it’s needed. It’s a good idea to export a key before you make changes to it. I’ll talk more about exported keys later.

Here you can see that I’ve navigated down into the Current User hive to take a look at my mapped network drives.

In this view, I have the “Z” key open. In the right pane (data pane), you can see the entries for the data values under this key. Each piece of data under a key has a name, type and value. The data name can be almost any string of letters as long as it doesn’t contain a space. There are several types of data, as shown above, and you can learn more about them in the regedit help file.

Right clicking into an empty area in the data pane will bring up the “New” menu, as shown above, which allows you to add new data entries. Right clicking on one of the data entries, as shown below, will allow you to modify its value or delete it entirely.

Importing data into the registry

Above I mentioned that you can export a key to save all the sub-keys and data under it. When you export a key, you will see that it wants to save as a REG file.

A .reg file is actually a plain text file and you can open it up in Notepad to see what’s inside of it. Here’s a look inside of one:

That’s good to know, because you will often find registry tweaks published online in plain text as shown in the image above. All you need to do is to copy the text, paste it into Notepad and then save it as a .REG file.

Once you have a REG file that you want to restore or add to the registry, all you need to do is double click on it, or right click on it and “Merge” it into the registry. When you do this, you’ll get a message asking you to confirm this action.

After you confirm, you’ll get a message telling you that the information was entered.

Notes:

• If you’ve made changes to the registry, you won’t always see an immediate change (if it’s one you can see). Many times you will have to log out of Windows and log back in before you see any changes.


• Some free tools make it easy to change your registry without using regedit. These programs are often called “tweak” or “system enhancement” tools, such as TweakUI (from Microsoft).


• Here are some sites with lots of registry tweaks you can apply to Windows.


• Here are some tutorials on how to use the registry and REG files.


• Here is a list of free registry tools.

http://bit.ly/aJGTmJ