As most Windows 95/NT users will know, the registry is a vital part of the system. It stores all sorts of information and settings about your hardware and software without which Windows and application programs cannot function. The registry supersedes Windows 3.x's INI files, although some INI files are retained for compatibility with older programs.

Your PC may not work properly if the registry files become corrupted. Problems can be as small as one or two minor functions not doing what they did, or as big as Windows or a program being unable to run. And so it is important to make regular backups of your registry files and also to check the registry's integrity.

Windows 95 did not have a tool for integrity checking, but Windows 98 plugs that hole with Registry Checker. Simply run the program to have it check your registry files. Registry Checker's efficiency remains to be seen, but we don't expect it to trap every possible error. It will probably find gross problems such as ones that make the structure of the file invalid in some way, rather than spotting that you've used RegEdit to change the data value of one of WobbleWord 3's registry keys to something it chokes on.

If you're lucky, a Registry Checker session is over in a jiffy and looks like this:

If you're unlucky, Registry Checker will restore Windows' own backup of the registry, made automatically on each successful start-up.

However, it is unwise to rely on this copy of the registry as your only backup. Some problems don't prevent Windows from loading, and so the backup copy may be corrupt too. You should keep at least one backup of your own, preferably two or three going back over a period of time – see Help Screen in issue 141 of PC Plus for more guidance on doing this:

Windows 98 runs Registry Checker automatically on start-up. It is started with the autorun switch:

C:\WINDOWS\scanregw.exe /autorun

This causes the program to run without a visible display unless there is a problem. In this instance, Registry Checker is run by being named in the following section of the registry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Run.