What is a Registry?

October 8th, 2009 by , under Registry repair. No Comments

You may have heard a lot about it but still have a question circling your mind, ‘what is the registry?’ Well you may need to know that a registry is to your PC what the nervous system is to your body. Just as the nervous system controls the way your body responds to external stimuli, the registry regulates the responsiveness of the PC when a command is run by you.

The registry is the place where, almost all ‘preference settings’ of your operating system as well as other application software, is stored. The files are generally stored in a ‘.ini’ format. But even though this is virtually the ‘command center’ of your computer you may not know much about it because it basically functions in the background.

Hence a question such as ‘what is the registry?’ riddles most of PC users around the world. However it’s not that that difficult to know what a registry is all about.

You bring up the registry panel on your Pc by typing in the command ‘regedit’ in the commands prompt box. You will find many well organized ‘directories’ under the main registry panel. These directories are actually ‘keys’ and the entries within these keys are called ‘values’. The data stored in these values are actually the previously discussed preference settings.

These directories are arranged in order of hierarchy, with each having different names which denote the different types of data stored. The list goes something like this:

• Hkey_classes_root: this directory stores data such as file associations with various softwares in the system.
• Hkey_current_user: all settings used by the current user or in other words the person logged on to the PC, are saved in this directory.
• Hkey_local_machine: this directory stores values and data that pertain to all users of the PC.
• Hkey_users: this stores information regarding all login identities created on the PC.
• Hkey_current_config: this contains all system preferences if there are multiple operating systems on a single PC.

So now you may actually be having some answers to ‘what is the registry?’ Read on to find out some more facts about the registry.

You can actually alter the registry from the panel that can be brought up by running the ‘regedit’ command. But why do you need to alter or edit the registry at all?

Well this is simply because as we keep uninstalling old programs the values and entries relating to them are not simultaneously from the system registry. So the directory often gets overloaded with old file associations and thus your new programs might run slower than usual. This is because the operating system takes that much longer to sift through the cluttered registry.

You can delete the unnecessary entries from the various directories manually and give proper shape to the registry. But if you are not very computer savvy then you might accidentally end up deleting some critical system related entries. In that case the best alternative for you may be to use professional software for cleaning up the registry.

Such software can scan and delete redundant entries and values from the registry in quick time. RegDefense is such a software that you may want to use for dealing with a clogged registry. With features such as deep scan and back-up it’s one of the best bets around.

Now that you don’t have the question, ‘what is the registry?‘ bugging you anymore you might go ahead and cleanup your registry for a great computing experience.