Microsoft® Windows® Desktop Deployment Resource Kit

Editing from the Command Prompt

Windows XP Professional comes with the Console Registry Tool for Windows (Reg.exe), which is nothing short of marvelous. You use it to edit the registry from the MS-DOS command prompt. You can do with Reg.exe just about anything you can do with Regedit, and more. The best part of Reg.exe is that you can use it to write simple scripts in the form of batch files that change the registry. And unlike in earlier versions of Windows, you don’t have to install Reg.exe. It’s installed by default and combines the numerous registry tools that came with the resource kits for earlier versions of Windows.

This tool is cool enough for me to start with an example. Example 8-6 is a simple batch file that installs Microsoft Office ...