[Ed. note: In Part 1, we looked at the origin and function of the Windows 95 Registry. This month we learn just a little bit about editing the Registry. This information is a bit complex, and should be used at the discretion of an informed Windows user.]

Editing the Registry
If you try to look at the registry with a standard text editor, you will see a lot of strange characters and a few legible entries here and there. That's because the registry is a structured database, and needs to be interpreted. There's a program called REGEDIT.EXE that does just that; it is located in your \Windows folder. You can either bring up Explorer and double-click on this file to start the Registry Editor (Figure 1), or you can simply go to the Start menu, click Run , type REGEDIT.EXE on the command line, and press ENTER.

Now, this is what Regedit looks like: Figure 2

As you can see, the Registry looks a lot like the Explorer view of a hard drive. It works the same way; you expand a "key" (which looks like a folder) by pressing the + sign beside it, and collapse it by pressing the - sign. When you click on a key, you will see the entries it contains in the right pane. These entries are called "key values."

The first keys you see when you start Regedit are the Main keys. There area maximum of 6, though some keys are repeats of others. When you expand these, you will see the sub-keys, which can be of virtually any quantity.

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