Managing The Windows 2000 Registry

Searching for Keys and Values

One of RegEdit ’s best features is its ability to search the Registry for a particular key or value. For example, let’s say that you want to find where the Dial-Up Networking (DUN) service stores its list of phonebook entries. You could go to Microsoft’s Knowledge Base and look it up, but the fastest way to find your answer is to use RegEdit ’s search function to look for entries whose contents match the name of one of your phonebook entries.

There are a few things you need to know about how searches work. Searches are case-insensitive, so you don’t have to pay attention to proper capitalization. By default, searches are substring searches, not literal searches. Searching always starts with the “first” root key, which in RegEdit ’s case means that all searches have to plow through HKCR first. Finally, the search process accepts only ASCII text and looks only in string values. That makes it impossible to find all the values whose DWORD value is 0x220 or to find data stored in values of type REG_BINARY.

You activate the Find command with the Edit→Find menu command. You then see the dialog box shown in Figure 4-3.

Figure 4-3. RegEdit’s Find dialog

Finding values is pretty straightforward: if you want to search the entire Registry, just type your search string into the “Find what” field and click the Find Next button. Of course, you can be more selective ...