- #WHAT HAPPENS IF YOU DO NOT REGISTER WINDOWS WINDOWS 10#
- #WHAT HAPPENS IF YOU DO NOT REGISTER WINDOWS PC#
- #WHAT HAPPENS IF YOU DO NOT REGISTER WINDOWS WINDOWS#
This is especially useful when you’re looking for options that aren’t normally exposed in Windows. But you can often find “registry hacks” online that tell you what settings you need to change to accomplish a particular task. The registry itself is a big mess of a database, and you won’t find much by clicking through it yourself, of course. It lets you click through the registry and change individual registry settings. However, you can edit the registry yourself with the Registry Editor, included with Windows.
#WHAT HAPPENS IF YOU DO NOT REGISTER WINDOWS WINDOWS#
Windows itself and many programs use the registry, and you usually don’t have to worry about it. Most Windows users will never need to touch the registry. But Windows itself makes extensive use of the registry. Some programs store all (or just some) of their settings in configuration files-for example, under your Application Data folder. Each program developer can decide to use the registry for every setting, just a few settings, or no settings. Not all programs store all their settings in the Windows registry.
The registry can now be used by all programs, and it helps bring together the settings that would otherwise be scattered in many different locations across the disk. INI configuration files that were scattered across the OS. Microsoft introduced the registry back in Windows 3.1, but it was initially used only for certain types of software. In the Windows 3.1 era, Windows applications frequently stored settings in. These groups are called “hives” because of one of the original developers of Windows NT hated bees. The registry is made up of multiple groups of keys and values like HKEY_CURRENT_USER and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE. The registry contains folder-like “keys” and “values” inside those keys that can contain numbers, text, or other data.
#WHAT HAPPENS IF YOU DO NOT REGISTER WINDOWS PC#
When you sign out of your PC and shut down, it saves the state of the registry to the disk. When you change a program’s settings, it can change the settings in the registry. When you launch a program, it can check the registry stored in memory to find its configuration settings. When you sign in to Windows, it loads the settings from these files into memory. You can’t edit these files directly.īut it doesn’t matter where these files are stored, because you’ll never need to touch them.
#WHAT HAPPENS IF YOU DO NOT REGISTER WINDOWS WINDOWS 10#
On Windows 10 and Windows 7, the system-wide registry settings are stored in files under C:\Windows\System32\Config\, while each Windows user account has its own NTUSER.dat file containing its user-specific keys in its C:\Windows\Users\Name directory. There are system-wide registry settings that apply to all users, and each Windows user account also has its own user-specific settings.
The Windows registry is a collection of several databases. What is the Windows Registry, and How Does It Work?