The hierarchical database – Registry – for Windows stores settings and options for configuration on MS Windows operating systems.
The registry contains set-up for components of low-level operating systems and the applications based on that platform. Registry is used by device drivers, the kernels, SAM, user interface, services and all the third party software.
The Windows Registry also enables to access counter which helps in analyzing the performance of system.
The Windows Registry was first launched in the market with Windows 3.1 to store important configuration information for COM-based components.
The use of registry was inflated with the launch of Windows 95 and Windows NT so as to organize the surplus of INI files per program, which had been used earlier to amass settings of configuration for Windows programs.
Keys and values are the two basic components of the MS registry.
Stored inside the keys are the pairs of name/data known as registry values.
The Windows API functions, querying and manipulating values of registry, get value names in a different way from the key path. They may also use handle which identify the parent key.
However, the terminology is misguiding to some extent, as values are identical to an associative array, where basic terminology would recognize the values name portion as a “key”.
The terminologies are a proffer from the 16-bit registry of Windows 3, wherein keys did not possess arbitrary pairs of name/data, but instead had just a single unnamed value that essentially needed to be a string.
The Windows registry can be edited in a manual way in MS Windows by executing regedt32.exe or regedit.exe in the directory of Windows.
Although, neglectfully editing the registry can result in irreparable damage or you end up with a slow Windows 7. Therefore, Microsoft and several industry experts, including the writers and editors of leading trade magazines, have highly recommended to perform backups of the registry prior to editing it.
A direct implementation of the current registry tool was seen in Windows 3.x, known as the “Registration Editor” or “Registration Info Editor”.
It was mainly only an applications database that facilitates editing embedded OLE objects.
However, it should be remembered that both the editors have several differences.
For the first time, the two programs were merged into one by Windows XP, which adopted the traditional REGEDIT.EXE as interface and added to it the functionality of REGEDT32.EXE.
However, the distinctions do not occur with Windows XP as well as the newer versions REGEDIT.EXE being the improved editor and REGEDT32.EXE being purely a stub invoking REGEDIT.EXE.
The Registry Editor permits users to carry out functions that follow:
- Importing and exporting .REG files, exporting data in the binary hive format
- Creating, manipulating, renaming and deleting registry keys, subkeys, values and value data
- Finding particular strings in key names, value names and value data
- Bookmarking user-selected registry keys as Favorites
Linux platform too allows for editing the registry with the assistance of an open source tool called Offline NT Password & Registry Editor.