Using the Windows Registry

Welcome to PCWizKid’s Tech Talk. Today, I wanted to talk about the Windows Registry. In the past and my previous videos I’ve always showed how to edit the registry and how can to act the change of values to tweak your PC for performance and improve that way that your PC works in Windows. Now I’m going to talk a little a bit about how the Windows Registry itself is set up and so you can understand a little bit better and know what you’re really trying to do. Now the Windows Registry obviously is accessed by typing regedit in the run command. Alright so if you click on Start and then click on Run, type in regedit one word, no spaces and then hit enter, there you go. The Windows Registry comes up. Now let me talk a little bit about these different areas in the Windows Registry. First of all, let’s talk about these five different areas that the registry is divided into. They’re called Hives, these five areas. Now these Hives themselves are stored in your C column\Windows System 32 folder. These are configuration settings that are stored under the config area of your System 32 folder. Now let’s talk about these five areas, the first one the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT. This one is used to store default types, default extensions that tells your Windows how to handle the different file types and which user interface options to use. So that’s what the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT is used for. Now the next one the HKEY_USERS, this one keeps the system information about every user on the system. So if you have multiple people logging on the machine for example, different types of users that’s stored in there, their profiles. The next one the HKEY_CURRENT_USER, this one contains the system setup information for the machine’s current user. So this includes like the desktop preferences, their wallpaper things like that, their printer and security settings, stuff like that. The next one the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, this hive stores the information about the computer itself and the hard work configuration that’s attached to it. So whatever keyboard you have, mouse, hard drive that you have installed, things like that, that’s all in there, all that information is in there and mre. The next one after that the HKEY_CURRENT_CONFIG, this hive keeps the current hard work configuration during your active session. So when you log in to your machine if you have certain things configured and set up hard work wise well it’s keeping that configuration setting in that registry hive. All right so in the past what we’ve got into the registry by typing regedit we’ve actually got in the list of the list of these hives right this five different areas and you’ve seen plus signs in front of them and under that there are keys so these yellow folders as we click on the plus sign and expand them we see sub-keys. So these are sub keys. That’s what these are called and as you select and go and expand further each sub-key then you’re obviously going to get down into the values that are within each of these and that’s what editing, hacking, tweaking Windows is all about. Whatever you change in the behavior and settings you’re actually changing these values and these values are being stored in here. So whether you’re using tweak Y, tweak VI or other programs or manually editing that, the bottom line is all of this information is actually being stored here in this registry and these values. So in my previous videos you’ve seen that I’ve told you how to go in and specifically edit a value to do some performance tweaking. Right this would apply for any other type of setting. Whether it’s the user information, profile information your desktop, your icons anything. All of that is stored here as different values. And of course each of this keys when you go to edit them these different types of editing values, these different types of right there’s numbers, there’s tax. It all depends on what you’re trying to do. So you don’t want to go in the start changing things if you don’t know what each of this values mean. So that’s why you got to be more specific, follow my videos, follow my instructions and if you can always make a restore point and windows or back up your registry, right so that way you have a back up and you can restore from so. Use the Windows Restore Feature, do check point and then you can go and do some tweaking that you can change the values and see the results next time you reboot the PC. So that’s what the Windows Registry is all about, it’s stored into those different areas, the configurations and into those different five hives. So just remember if you’re trying to search for something of course it gets a little bit difficult to try to find what you want so you can always use the search feature to find feature within the registry, right that you can either press control after we’re going here at the toolbar and you will find and then search for what it is that you need and then find and that way you can find it quickly and do some editing. Some people want to delete tab history of files, remove orphan files, remove references to programs that no longer exist for installing the computer sometimes you get errors about a file that keeps popping up and that’s not able to find that file and you know that you deleted a file but that registry keep popping up that it’s looking for that file. Well if you go in and find the name of that file in the registry you could delete it. So next time you reboot the computer it won’t ask for that file anymore because you deleted the value. You deleted that reference in the registry. So there’s a lot of things that you can do clean up the registry that sometimes other programs like CCleaner or any other registry tweak programs cannot do for you. So then you’ll have to go and manually and try to tweak it and do it yourself, right but before you do that we need to understand what you’re trying to do here what you’re dealing with. So that’s why I thought I put this video together so you can get a good idea on how and what the registry is all about. So hope you enjoy this video and thank you for watching.