What Are Registry Keys?
Inside a Windows environment, the Registry is something which was brought into existence in the mid-1990s with Windows 95.
Your computer’s Registry is like its centralized data watcher and program commander. It is the brains of your computer; and just like a human brain, it is ever-changing as it receives new data and information.
Also like the human brain, it’s an hierarchical structure similar to what you observe when you look at a directory/file “tree” on a computer.
It contains and organizes thousands of settings that govern your hard drive, software, and entire computer (they’ll be user.dat and system.dat files).
We will look at this from a…musical standpoint.It allows us to use pictures to help explain it easier.Within the Registry’s structure you’ve got:
A Main Key — also known as “the Hive”. Consider this to be the piano. Its holds all of the pieces within to make great music.Inside it caries the substructures that allows you to play it, which are the…
Keys — These are organizational units within the Registry. Keys are like…well the piano keys that are being played here. Within them might be values or subkeys (which themselves might contain still more subkeys).
Keys resemble folders, for they can hold yet more subkeys or the file (“values”) in the Registry. (Values contain the actual data within a key or a subkey.)
Also know that if a key to that piano is missing, the great musician who is trying to play a specific song that requires that key, will have problems making it work.
The harmony is off, and then the crowd begins booing! Okay maybe not from one bad note…but if it continues the pianist will be left with garbage and then have to fear for his life!
Fixing errors and cleanly removing software from your computer’s Registry involves finding and editing the correct key. You need to figure out the correct key, and then you need to figure out how to get to it so you can edit it.
Once you find them, registries and/or keys should be backed up before you go making changes.
Here’s how to backup your registry.
Hopefully this will give you a better understanding to what are registry keys and how they work to help keep your computer safe and sound.