Windows Registry Part 1

Most of the PC's in the world are running on windows platform or at least the most of the PC's in the eastern world are using it just because of its easy user interface. This post is about one of the core components of the windows - the Windows registry. Windows Registry is a directory which stores the setting and other important things which are required for the proper running of the windows OS. It also has the settings for the hardware, non operating system's settings etc. Whenever the authenticated user makes a change in the control panel settings, installs software which needs to change the registry keys everything gets reflected here in this directory files. By accessing the registry files it will show us the system properties and more or less all the information regarding the system like the counters, active hardware etc. It is very similar to the runtime processing shower syncs and procfs. Before these windows registry was invented there were *.ini files which is used to save the settings of the programs then and there in their respective folders later this method was found absurd because the windows had difficulty in tracking all these *.ini files every time the windows executes an operation. The following are the list of registry values used in windows,

• REG_NONE
• REG_SZ
• REG_EXPAND_SZ
• REG_BINARY
• REG_DWORD/REG_DWORD_LITTLE_ENDIAN
• REG_DWORD_BIG_ENDIAN
• REG_LINK
• REG_MULTI_SZ
• REG_RESOURCE_LIST
• REG_FULL_RESOURCE_DESCRIPTOR
• REG_RESOURCE_REQUIREMENTS_LIST
• REG_QWORD/REG_QWORD_LITTLE_ENDIAN

These registry values are used for different registry keys to change their value.