Managing The Windows 2000 Registry

Printing Registry Contents

If you want to print all or part of the Registry, you’re in luck: RegEdit can produce a printout that contains the full path, subkeys, and values of the key you select. The Registry→Print... command allows you to print the entire Registry or any subset of it, using the dialog box shown in Figure 4-4.

Figure 4-4. RegEdit’s Print dialog box

The “Print range” group gives you a convenient way to filter the keys you print. Selecting the All radio button will (as you’d expect) print the entire Registry. I don’t recommend doing this unless you have a very fast printer with a very large paper tray. The “Selected branch” button is a better alternative; with it, you can choose a single subkey to be printed.

RegEdit’s printed output is pretty rudimentary. It doesn’t have any way to print page headers or footers, and its output isn’t indented or otherwise formatted to make it more readable. For quick reference, you may find it more useful to export a portion of the Registry (as described in Exporting Registry Data later in this chapter), then print it using your favorite text editor.