08Aug Structure of Windows Registry

The windows registry has over thousands of different settings and information on the operating systems working. One can even say that they are ten thousands of them. To get out of this heap they are organized into mainly five partitions. These partitions are called hives, commonly known as Registry Hives. If you get to explore the windows registry you could see that many of the settings in one hive have been mirrored in the other. That is these set of registries are allies to each other. If you change a setting on one will change the setting on other. The five registry hives are:-

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT

This hive is generally used to store information on filetypes and file extensions. This instructs an operating system to what to deal with this type of file.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER

This hives stores the information of the user who has logged in. It mainly keeps system setup information for that user such as logon styles themes documents etc.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE

In this registry hive the computer keeps information about itself and the operating system which being loaded. It gives details about the hardware and other peripherals connected to the system.

HKEY_USERS

Profiles of the entire registered user are stored in this hive.

HKEY_CURRENT_CONFIG

This stores the information of current hardware configuration as HKEY_CURRENT_USER stores information on current user.