Introduction
Every Windows based system has a so called registry. It's a
place where the Windows operating system and third party software
can store information. Usually software including the operating
system store their settings to the registry, this makes the
registry a very vital part of your system.
Structure
The registry is organized in a hierarchical structure, and is
comprised of subtrees and their keys, hives, and value entries.
Here's an example of what a single registry key looks like:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion
The first part of it ("HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE") is the
root key, also known as hive. It's just like the drive letter
in file system. Then comes the registry key "Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion",
this like the directory path in file system. Then there's also
registry entries which contain all the actual data. These are
a like files in file system, each registry entry has a name
(known as the "entry" or "value name") and
contents ("value" or "data"). |
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