Keys and Values and Classes, Oh My!

The Registry scares people. Practically every Windows NT user or administrator has some horror story of the damage done to a machine by careless Registry editing. Microsoft doesn't try to discourage this perception, either; the articles in their Knowledge Base, as well as documentation in the various resource kits, is liberally peppered with warnings about the dire consequences of screwing up something vital if you make a mistake while editing the Registry.

While making a mistaken Registry edit can indeed send your machine to Blue Screen of Death territory quick as a wink, there's no reason to be afraid of the Registry any more than you'd be afraid of a chainsaw, your car, or a high-speed lathe. If you know how to safely handle any of those inanimate objects, you can do much more work with them than you can manually.

This book teaches you how to safely use the Registry; how to administer, back up, and recover Registry data on computers running Windows 2000, both locally and over the network; and how to use the Registry editing tools Microsoft supplies, and when you should--and should not--do so. Much of the material also applies to Windows NT, since there are more similarities than differences between the two.