Another way to configure your computer is with the help of Windows's Registry Editor. But,
exert caution when doing changes to the registry as this is vital to your computer's operation
and when you've entered or modified something that you shouldn't, your computer may not function normally, or else, might get broken. In this blog post, we're going to show you the registry editor and its different branches.
How to open the Registry Editor?
There are different ways to open Registry Editor in Windows:
In the search box on the taskbar, type "regedit." Then, select the top result for Registry Editor (Desktop app).
Press and hold or right-click the Start button, then select Run. Enter regedit in the Open: box and select OK.
Click on Windows Key (⊞) + R, type in "regedit," then click enter.
Structure of the Registry
The Registry has a hierarchical structure that is critcal for the operation of your computer and the applications and services that run on Windows. It is very similar to the directories of your computer's drive. Each branch, denoted by a folder icon in the Registry Editor, is called a key. Each key can contain both subkeys and data entries called values. Each key has a name consisting of one or more printable characters. Key names are not case sensitive. Key names cannot include the backslash character (), but any other printable character can be used. Value names and data can include the backslash character. Every value contains information that is stored in the Registry. There are three types of values that you can find in the Registry Editor, namely: String, Binary, and DWORD (stands for double word) - the use of these values depends upon the context.
Modern versions of the Registry Editor (from Windows 2000 to Windows 10) has 5 different branches. They all contain different information of different specific portions found in the registry. They are as follows:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT - this branch has all of the different file types on your computer as well as OLE (Object Linking & Embedding) information for all your OLE-aware applications
HKEY_CURRENT_USER - this branch points to the part of HKEY_USERS that is appropriate for the current user account of your computer
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE - this branch contains all the information about different hardware and software installed on your computer. Since you are able to specify multiple hardware configurations, the current hardware configuration is what is specified in HKEY_CURRENT_CONFIG.
HKEY_USERS - this branch contains certain preferences (such as Windows colors and different settings) for each of the user accounts of the computer. In modern versions of Windows, the default branch here contains a template to be used for newly added users.
HKEY_CURRENT_CONFIG - this branch points to the part of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE that appropriate for your current hardware configuration.
And that is a basic explanation of the Registry Editor. We haven't went into full detail about how to configure your computer via the Registry Editor because it's very dangerous to change things in the Registry, and like we have mentioned above, may break your computer. We recommend to only modify the Registry if you really know what you are doing or if you are an experienced professional.
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