Windows XP in a Nutshell

Ten Cool Things You Can Do in Your Registry

Armed with your new understanding of the Windows XP Registry, you’re no doubt ready to get in there and start exploring. Hopefully, this chapter has provided the “lay of the land” you need to get and keep your bearings in the otherwise confusing wilderness of the Registry. While we don’t have the kind of room in this book it takes to make you an expert, we would like to send you on your way by pointing out some interesting landmarks; i.e., ten cool changes you can make in your own Registry.

1. Expand the scope of IE’s AutoComplete feature.

   In Internet Explorer, you can enter an incomplete URL (i.e., oreilly instead of www.oreilly.com) and IE will attempt to complete the address itself by searching for all instances. However, IE only searches the .com, .edu, .net, and .org top-level domains (TLDs) by default, and only tries the www prefix. To add new domain suffixes and prefixes to search, go to:

   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\UrlTemplate

   By default, this key has four values in Windows XP: 1, 2, 3, and 4, set to www.%s.com, www.%s.net, www.%s.org, and www.%s.edu, respectively. The value names (the numbers) specify the search order (lower numbers take precedence), and the data specifies the format. Feel free to rearrange the existing items, remove unwanted items, or add new TLDs, like .gov (for US government websites), .co.nz (for commercial web sites in New Zealand), or .store (one of the newly proposed TLDs, ...