Introduction
Every Windows based
system has a so called registry. It's a place where the
Windows operating system and third party software can store
information. Usually software including the operating system
store their settings to the registry, this makes the registry
a very vital part of your system.
Structure
The registry is organized
in a hierarchical structure, and is comprised of subtrees and
their keys, hives, and value entries. Here's an example of
what a single registry key looks
like:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion
The
first part of it ("HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE") is the root key, also
known as hive. It's just like the drive letter in file system.
Then comes the registry key
"Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion", this like the
directory path in file system. Then there's also registry
entries which contain all the actual data. These are a like
files in file system, each registry entry has a name (known as
the "entry" or "value name") and contents ("value" or
"data"). | |
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