Platinum Edition Using® Microsoft® Windows® XP

The Registry in a Nutshell

The Windows XP Registry is the central repository in which Windows and most properly written Windows applications store all configuration information, including such items as these:

• Hardware settings

• Software configuration information

• User settings to build the user profile

• Licensing and registration information

• Application usage histories

• Recently accessed file lists

• Software associations to identify which application opens a file based on the file's extension

Long ago, in the days when 8088s through 80386s still roamed the earth, every program with settings to maintain did so through an INI file. Windows stored most of the basic startup and system configuration information in either SYSTEM.INI or WINDOWS.INI. Now, almost ...