15Jul History of Windows Registry

The Windows Registry is a difficult subject to deal with. Most of the advanced users get to a halt while editing it, as in a wrong entry can turn it to crash the operating system.

In the early days, windows registry was not into business. There used to be a lot of ‘.ini’ files in the root directory. These ‘.ini’ files used to store machine information, software information and information about the different users using it. This information were differentiated using a hierarchical structure. As the days passed, public felt it difficult to sort out the information from the heap of information files. The Windows Registry we see today was used later on as a way out of this difficulty.

When a system starts, the Windows operating system uses the data from registry to configure software, hardware and other peripherals that were installed before turning off the machine. Registry of Windows XP makes a backup copy of the registry file with which, the system had last successfully started. This aids when the system crashes with the current registry configuration. It then uses the last known good configuration for the system startup.

The Registry information of Windows XP is physically stored in “C:\Windows\System32\Config\” folder. These information cannot be edited directly. They need to undergo access through Registry editing program as “Regedt32.exe” and “Regedit.exe”.