Managing The Windows 2000 Registry

Working with Keys and Values

By now, you probably have a good feel for the Registry’s structure. Once you’re comfortable navigating the Registry with RegEdit, it’s time to move on to the mechanics of working with keys and values in the Registry. RegEdit has a complete suite of commands for creating, modifying, deleting, and renaming keys and values. However, it doesn’t have a safety net, so be sure to limit your initial experimentation with editing to changes you can back out if necessary--and don’t forget the backup strategies you learned in Chapter 3.

Warning

Even though it was mentioned before, it bears repeating: there’s no convenient way to undo changes you make when editing the Registry with RegEdit. Make sure you’ve developed and are executing a Registry backup strategy. If you’re not, please go back and read Chapter 3 before you start editing anything.

Now is also a good time to mention a few things that RegEdit can’t do. Chief among them is the fact that it can’t directly edit or create values that aren’t of one of the three types it supports: DWORD, binary, and string. You can edit values of these other types, but you have to do so by viewing and editing the hex bytes that make up the binary version of the data--not a task to undertake lightly! This limitation makes it harder to edit REG_MULTI_SZ or REG_EXPAND_SZ values, which are fairly common; it’s also a problem if you try to modify the more obscure data types discussed in Minor Datatypes in Chapter 2. As a practical ...