Windows registry how does it work

VP and General Manager, Lifewire. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn. Updated on March 19, Chris Selph. Lifewire Technology Review Board Member.

Article reviewed on Jun 12, Tweet Share Email. In This Article. When to Use Windows Registry. How to Access the Registry. How to Use the Registry. Availability in Windows. Location of the Registry. Was this page helpful? Thanks for letting us know! Email Address Sign up There was an error. Please try again. You're in! Thanks for signing up. There was an error. Tell us why! More from Lifewire. CCleaner v5. This key is normally only writable by users with administrative privileges on the local system.

Each configured Control Set contains:. This key contains software and Windows settings in the default hardware profile. It is mostly modified by application and system installers. This key contains information gathered at runtime; information stored in this key is not permanently stored on disk, but rather regenerated at boot time.

This key contains information about registered applications, such as file associations and OLE Object Class IDs, tying them to the applications used to handle these items. The design allows for either machine- or user-specific registration of COM objects.

The user-specific classes hive, unlike the HKCU hive, does not form part of a roaming user profile. This key stores settings that are specific to the currently logged-in user.

Settings in this hive follow users with a roaming profile from machine to machine. This key provides runtime information into performance data provided by either the NT kernel itself, or running system drivers, programs and services that provide performance data.

This key is not stored in any hive and not displayed in the Registry Editor, but it is visible through the registry functions in the Windows API, or in a simplified view via the Performance tab of the Task Manager only for a few performance data on the local system or via more advanced control panels such as the Performances Monitor or the Performances Analyzer which allows collecting and logging these data, including from remote systems.

This key used only on Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows Me. It contains information about hardware devices, including Plug and Play and network performance statistics. The information in this hive is also not stored on the hard drive. The Plug and Play information is gathered and configured at startup and is stored in memory. Registry values are referenced separately from registry keys. Each registry value stored in a registry key has a unique name whose letter case is not significant.

Registry values may contain backslashes in their name but doing so makes them difficult to distinguish from their key paths when using some legacy Windows Registry API functions whose usage is deprecated in Win You can edit the registry yourself to enable hidden features and tweak specific options.

The Windows registry is a collection of several databases. There are system-wide registry settings that apply to all users, and each Windows user account also has its own user-specific settings. When you sign in to Windows, it loads the settings from these files into memory. When you launch a program, it can check the registry stored in memory to find its configuration settings.

When you sign out of your PC and shut down, it saves the state of the registry to the disk. Yes, seriously. Microsoft introduced the registry back in Windows 3. In the Windows 3. INI configuration files that were scattered across the OS. The registry can now be used by all programs, and it helps bring together the settings that would otherwise be scattered in many different locations across the disk. Not all programs store all their settings in the Windows registry.

Each program developer can decide to use the registry for every setting, just a few settings, or no settings. Some programs store all or just some of their settings in configuration files—for example, under your Application Data folder. But Windows itself makes extensive use of the registry. Most Windows users will never need to touch the registry. However, you can edit the registry yourself with the Registry Editor, included with Windows. It lets you click through the registry and change individual registry settings.

Some things you can only achieve by hacking the registry. Other settings are available in Group Policy on Professional editions of Windows , but you can usually change them in a Home edition of Windows by tweaking the registry.

We generally recommend backing up the registry and your computer , which you should always have backups of! But if you follow legitimate instructions properly, you will not have a problem.

Editing the registry is pretty simple. This gives the Registry Editor the ability to modify system settings. Navigate to whatever key you need to modify in the left pane. To change a value, double-click it in the right pane and enter the new value. In other cases, you may need to create new keys folders. The registry hack will tell you what you need to do. You can also edit the registry by downloading and running.

You should only download and run. Better yet, you can make your own registry hack files.