Managing The Windows 2000 Registry

Chapter 9. Administering the Registry

When you’re responsible for administering computers--whether one or many--you quickly find that much of what you do on a daily basis is miscellanea. You create new accounts, remove old ones, figure out why your backup tape drive is dead, and so forth. It would be nice if your whole career could revolve around orderly, planned upgrades, maintenance, and migrations, but those little tasks are important too. This chapter introduces you to several small tasks related to managing the Registry. While none of them is a full-time activity, all of them are worth doing.

Setting Defaults for New User Accounts

Windows NT was designed from the start to support multiple user accounts sharing a single computer. Unlike DOS and Windows 3.x, Windows NT provided a way (through the Registry, actually) to keep individual settings for each user. However, the original versions of NT didn’t provide any way for these settings to be shared between computers, and there were no mechanisms for collecting all of a user’s settings data in a single place.

NT 4.0 was the first version of NT to support the concept of user profiles. Like the profiles in Win95, NT 4.0 profiles contain a user’s desktop environment, application settings, and other preferences. These profiles can be configured to roam from computer to computer, so that users can have their own personalized environment follow them to every machine they log onto. In addition, administrators can configure these profiles ...