Product Description

Now you can ignore the ominous warnings and set your registry fears aside thanks to John Woram's new book, The Windows 98 Registry: A Survival Guide For Users. Despite Microsoft's well-documented recommendations to not configure, customize, or in any way alter registry files, Woram demonstrates how the Windows registry is the most effective way to optimize your PC.

The Windows 98 Registry: A Survival Guide For Users explains how to repair a corrupted registry, troubleshoot common problems, remove leftovers," and edit INI files. Woram also includes a complete blueprint of the six HKEYs and an appendix dedicated to Tweak UI and the registry. So temper your registry trepidation with The Windows 98 Registry: A Survival Guide For Users and start getting the most out of your Windows PC.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1760915 in Books
• Published on: 1998-12-10
• Format: Illustrated
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 446 pages

From the Back Cover
"The Registry book of choice for power users." — PC Magazine Extensive list of Registry error messages included! Caution: Using the Registry Editor can cause serious improvements! For all of Microsoft's warnings about editing the Registry, it remains the most powerful, the most versatile — and often, the only — way to troubleshoot and customize your Windows PC. Try it! With the expert advice of Registry guru John Woram, you'll quickly gain the know-how you need to navigate the maze of HKEYs, subkeys, and data strings with complete confidence. Clearly organized and well illustrated, The Windows® 98 Registry takes the mystery out of the Registry, giving you a clear, detailed roadmap and straight-forward directions.

About the Author
John Woram is a Senior Contributing Editor at Windows magazine, where he writes the monthly "Optimizing Windows" column. He is the author of the extremely successful PC Configuration Handbook, which has sold over 250,000 copies and been translated into six foreign languages.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Custom Registry Editing Techniques

Excerpted from Chapter 6 of The Windows 98 Registry: A Survival Guide For Users
by John Woram

Featuring: Registry Edits at Startup Copy and Paste Operations

Now that you've dutifully backed up the Registry using the procedures described in the previous chapter, this chapter resumes the discussion of Registry editing that began in Chapter 4, but with the emphasis here on how to customize the Registry to configure Windows according to your personal preferences. As already described, the Registry may be edited by simply executing the REGEDIT.EXE utility and having at it. But in addition to the basic editing techniques described in Chapter 4, other Registry editing techniques may prove helpful from time to time. Like just about everything else associated with the Registry, the procedures described in this chapter are for the most part undocumented. Until you are quite sure that a specific procedure works well on your system, make sure you back up the Registry before experimenting. When you are finally certain that a procedure will not harm the Registry, make a backup anyway. In many cases, the procedures described in the "Automated List Removal" section of Chapter 4 can be revised as appropriate to handle repetitive custom configuration projects. Refer to that section for further details.

The chapter begins with a look at a few custom editing techniques, then describes various menu and icon editing procedures, and concludes by describing a handful of other editing techniques to customize a specific aspect of the Windows desktop.

Registry Edits at Startup

In addition to the KillList.BAT file described in the "INF File as a Registry Editor" section of Chapter 4, other techniques may be employed to automatically edit the Registry, every time the system is powered on or every time the Windows GUI is loaded. In either case, begin by setting the desired Registry values, export the appropriate key structure to a filename.REG file, and then follow one of the procedures given here.

Real-mode edits

The procedures described in the "Registry Editor in Real Mode" section at the end of Chapter 4 can be applied to make routine Registry edits every time the system is powered on. For example, add the following line to your AUTOEXEC.BAT file to import a filename.REG file into the Registry as part of the startup procedure:

REGEDIT filename.REG

Revise this line to accomplish whatever editing task you would like to execute immediately before the Windows GUI opens. The technique might be useful if it becomes necessary to routinely clear restrictions set during a previous session, especially if those restrictions cannot be cleared once Windows fully opens.

Import from StartUp folder

As an alternative to the just-described real-mode procedure, place a filename.REG file (or a shortcut to it) in the C:\Windows\Start Menu\ Programs\StartUp folder. By doing so, the file will be imported into the Registry every time the Windows 95 GUI opens, which may be a convenient means to routinely reset various Registry values without rebooting the system.

Silent Mode Import

Note however, that this technique pauses the opening procedure to display an "Information . . . has been successfully entered into the Registry" message, which remains onscreen until the user clicks the OK button. To avoid the notification and pause, either use the real-mode edit method described above, or else write a shortcut command line as follows: REGEDIT /S FILENAME.REG

The undocumented /S switch imports the specified file into the Registry but neither displays a message nor pauses until the OK button is clicked.

Export from StartUp folder

Although of limited usefulness, it's also possible to export a section of the Registry as part of the startup procedure by using the following command:

REGEDIT /E FILENAME.REG HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.bmp

In this example, the /E switch creates a FILENAME.REG file that contains the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.bmp key structure. The silent mode /S switch described above is unnecessary because this action does not display a message or pause until the OK button is clicked.

Deletion from StartUp folder

The real-mode /D switch does not appear to be supported when the Registry Editor is run from within the Windows GUI. To automatically delete a Registry key structure, refer to the "Example of INF File use as Registry Editor" section of Chapter 4, and modify the file contents as necessary to delete the desired key structure.

Copy and Paste Operations

If it is ever necessary to create a new key based on the contents of an existing key, the latter key can be exported, revised as necessary, and then imported back into the Registry, as shown by this excerpt from an exefile key structure exported to an EXEFILE.REG file:

REGEDIT4

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\exefile]

@="Application"

"EditFlags"=hex:d8,07,00,00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\exefile\shell\open]

@=""

"EditFlags"=hex:00,00,00,00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\exefile\shell\open\command]

@="\"%1\" %*"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\exefile\shellex]

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\exefile\shellex\PropertySheetHandlers\
PifProps]

@="{86F19A00-42A0-1069-A2E9-08002B30309D}"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\exefile\shellex\PropertySheetHandlers\
{86F19A00-42A0-1069-A2E9-08002B30309D}]

@=""

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\exefile\DefaultIcon]

@="%1"

To write a new abcfile key in the same section of the Registry, open the exported file for editing, change every occurrence of exefile (shown underlined above) to abcfile, save the edited file as ABCFILE.REG, and import it into the Registry. A new abcfile key should be seen with the same subkey structure and contents as the exefile key, which may now be edited to customize it as required.

If you use a word processor's search and replace feature to make more extensive changes, make sure to save the edited file as plain ASCII text, so that the word processor's own formatting code is not inserted into the file.

Customer Reviews

Look elsewhere...
I agree with the previous review. Seemingly comprehensive but how do you get through it? Very poorly written. Compare his writing skills to Paul McFedries, for example, an excellent writer. A better book on the Win 98 Registry has to be out there.

No Better Resource
I'll use the previous reviewers words... "This book, while comprehensive, is not written for your average user". Unfortunate for some, fortunate for others, this book presupposes a certain level of knowledge. If you don't have it then you may have difficulty with comprehension. The prior reviewer gives the perfect example; the first sentence quoted is meant as a joke! It humorously conveys the confusion most people run into while dealing with complex computer and computer resource issues. Mr. Woram's writing has an amusing witty bite that not everyone can appreciate. If you can, then you will find no better resource than this.

Paid by the word?
This book, while comprehensive, is not written for your average user. As a PC technician for over 10 years, this book had me reading paragraphs two or three times in order to understand what Mr. Woram is trying to communicate. The book is written as you would expect a government manual on rules and regulations to be written. Example: "So whenever bad things happen and the Registry is a prime suspect, you should start searching for evidence in Chapter 7. However, if a problem is polite enough to announce itself by displaying a message, then try Chapter 8, where such messages are lined up for inspection. Some messages are self-explanatory, while others border on the incomprehensible. If you encounter one of the latter, perhaps the explanation offered in this book will help. And if neither the message nor the explanation is enough to resolve the problem, then you'll find a reference to a section in the previous chapter, or to an earlier part of the book, where the required information can be found." HUH?? He also details a way of backing up the two main HKEYs in DOS. What he fails to mention, however, is that those files have attributes that you must reset before you can run his example commands. OH, and if your registry is very large, this exporting can take upwards of an hour or more. And when doing the restore in DOS, he fails to mention that a large registry may result in an Out Of Memory error, since DOS has such limited memory capacity. He tends to be a bit wordy, with things like: "The title bar at the top of the window contains the conventional Windows components: a Control menu icon, the title of the application, and the usual three buttons for minimize, restore, and close. No further explanation is offered here." So while he feels the need to tell us that a registry error may 'annouce itself', he feels the need to tell us that it does this by 'displaying a message', (see above), and then he says, in the other example that "no other information is offered here." Well, one could deduce that fact on ones own, without that frivolous information. He writes parts of the book as if the reader has never used Windows before, and then writes other parts of the book using Hexidecimal codes without an explanation of how to interpret them. Example: "Just add 10 to the hexidecimal..." If you see 5E, how do you add 10 to that? This would require previous knowledge of hexidecimal since no explanation is offered in this book. Definately not a cover-to-cover read. An excellent reference for a technician or power user. Not for your average Joe.