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HACKS
100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools
Preston Gralla
WINDOWS XP
HACKS
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Preston Gralla
#68 The Registry is the single best tool available for hacking XP. Here’s an
introduction to how it’s organized and how to use it.
If you haven’t spent much time in the Registry, you can easily be cowed by
it. At first glance, it’s a maze of apparently incomprehensible settings. In
fact, though, there’s a method to the madness. The Registry is a hierarchical
database of information that defines exactly how your system works, includ-
ing virtually every part of XP and its applications. Editing the Registry data-
base is often the best way to hack XP. In fact, there are many changes to the
operating system that you can make in no other way.
Even if you’ve never used the Registry directly before, you’ve changed it
without realizing it. Whenever you change a setting using the Control Panel,
for example, behind the scenes a Registry change is made that puts that new
setting into effect. The menus and dialog boxes you see in XP are often little
more than a visual front-end to the Registry.
If you want to optimize XP and master every part of it, you’ll have to use the
Registry. XP contains so many different settings and customizations that it
simply wasn’t possible for Microsoft to build a graphical interface for every
conceivable possibility. And there are many times when it’s easier and you
get more options when you edit the Registry rather than using the graphical
XP interface. You can use Windows XP without ever editing the Registry—
many users do—but advanced users understand its power tool status.
The way to edit the Registry is by using the Registry Editor, also called Reg-
Edit, which is shown in Figure 7-1. To run it, type regedit at the Run box or
command line and press Enter.
Before you edit the Registry, though, you should first get a basic understand-
ing of its structure.
ers (SIDs), which uniquely identify users of the PC and which have
information about each user’s rights, settings, and preferences.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
This hive contains information about the computer itself, as well as about
the operating system. It includes specific details about all hardware,
including keyboard, printer ports, storage—the entire hardware setup. In
addition, it has information about security, installed software, system
startup, drivers, services, and the machine’s specific XP configuration.
HKEY_USERS
This hive contains information about every user profile on the system.
HKEY_CURRENT_CONFIG
This hive contains information about the current hardware configura-
tion of the system, in the same way that HKEY_CURRENT_USER contains
information about the current user of the system.
determines the amount of time between mouse clicks that must elapse before
Windows won’t consider it to be a double-click. To set the amount of time,
you change the key’s value. In this case, the default value is 500, measured in
milliseconds, and you can edit the Registry to change it to whatever value you
want, as shown in Figure 7-2. You can also make the changes using the Mouse
Properties dialog box (Start ➝ Control Panel ➝ Printers and Other Hardware
➝ Mouse). When you make changes to that dialog box, the changes are in
turn made in the Registry, which ultimately controls the setting. In essence,
the dialog box is merely a convenient front-end to the Registry.
A key can contain one or more values. Following are the five primary data
types of values in the Registry:
REG_SZ (String value)
This data type is easy to understand and edit because it is made up of
plain text and numbers. It is one of the most common data types in the
Registry. The value for DoubleClickSpeed, mentioned earlier in this hack,
is of this type.
To run the Registry Editor, type regedit in the Run box or a command
prompt and press Enter. If this is the first time you’ve run the Registry Edi-
tor, it will open highlighting the HKEY_CURRENT_USER hive, as shown in
Figure 7-6. If you’ve previously used the Registry Editor, it will open high-
lighting the last key you edited or the last place you were in the Registry.
Figure 7-6. Using the Registry Editor for the first time
You can browse through the Registry with the Registry Editor in the same
way you browse through a hard disk using Windows Explorer. Clicking a +
sign opens a key to reveal the next level down of the hierarchy. Clicking a –
sign closes the key.
The Registry can be several levels deep in keys and subkeys, so navigating it
using a mouse can take a substantial amount of time. (Every time you open
it, it jumps to the last-used key.) You can use shortcut keys, though, to more
easily navigate through the Registry. The right arrow key opens a key to
reveal subkeys; the left arrow key closes a key and moves one level up in the
key hierarchy. To jump to the next subkey that begins with a specific letter,
press that letter on the keyboard.
You use the Registry Editor to edit existing keys and values, create new keys
and values, or delete existing keys and values. Sometimes, the changes take
effect as soon as you make the change and exit the Registry Editor; other
times, you’ll have to reboot for them to take effect. Keep in mind that there
is no “Save” button. When you modify a value, it changes right then and
there. There is also no Undo button, so make your changes carefully.
If there’s a particular key that you want to edit, an even faster way to navi-
gate is to use the Find command from the Edit menu. (You can also use the
Find command by pressing Ctrl-F.) To find successive keys with the same
value, press the F3 key.
To edit the data associated with a value, double-click on the value in the
right pane of the Registry Editor; a box appears that lets you edit the value,
as shown in Figure 7-7.
When you’re editing the Registry, it’s often hard to tell what key you’re edit-
ing, because the Registry Editor doesn’t highlight that key. Instead, it shows
only an open folder icon next to it, but it’s easy to miss that icon. Check the
status bar at the bottom of the Registry Editor; it should display the key
you’re editing. If it doesn’t, choose View ➝ Status Bar from the Registry Edi-
tor menu.
To rename a key, select it and choose Edit ➝ Rename from the menu. You
can also right-click on the key and choose Edit ➝ Rename.
the type of value you want to create. We’ve already covered the five types of
values you can create; as a reminder, they’re detailed in Table 7-1.
To create a new value, type in the name of the new value and press Enter.
Press Enter again. The Edit Value dialog box appears, as shown in
Figure 7-7. Enter your data and press Enter.
See Also
• For an excellent collection of Registry hacks, go to the Registry Guide
for Windows at http://www.winguides.com/registry. Make sure to sign
up for the newsletter that offers Registry advice and hacks.