Microsoft Windows Registry Guide, Second Edition
Printing the Registry
Regedit has a feature that prints all or part of the registry. I confess that I've never printed anything in the registry; I just haven't found a good reason to do it. You can certainly print subkeys as a backup before making changes, but I tend to use hive files for that purpose, and this doesn't require me to retype keys, values, and data to restore the old settings. You might not get much use out of the print feature, but this chapter wouldn't be complete without describing how to use it. To print all or part of the registry, follow these steps:
Click the key you want to print, keeping in mind that you're going to print every subkey and value under it.
On the File menu, click Print to display the Print dialog box, shown in Figure 2-4.
Do one of the following:
To print the entire registry, select All.
To print the selected branch, select Selected Branch.
Click Print.
Figure 2-4 The format of Regedit's printer output is the same as the format that Regedit uses when exporting portions of the registry to a text file.
Listing 2-1 shows you what Regedit's printer output looks like. As you see, it's not very useful except maybe as a temporary way to remember values. Still, Microsoft greatly improved Regedit's printer output for Windows. Regedit now prints REG_DWORD values so they look like REG_DWORD values, rather than printing them as binary values in little-endian format. (See Chapter 1, “Learning the Basics.”) Regedit also prints binary values along with their ASCII-equivalent text. Finally, this version of Regedit actually prints each value's type so that you don't have to flip through pages to figure it out.
Listing 2-1 Sample Printer Output
Key Name: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\Setup Class Name: <NO CLASS> Last Write Time: 1/2/2002 - 1:16 AM Value 0 Name: SetupType Type: REG_DWORD Data: 0x0 Value 1 Name: SystemSetupInProgress Type: REG_DWORD Data: 0x0 Value 2 Name: CmdLine Type: REG_SZ Data: Value 3 Name: SystemPrefix Type: REG_BINARY Data: 00000000 cd 03 00 00 00 80 3c d2 - Í.....<Ò Value 4 Name: SystemPartition Type: REG_SZ Data: \Device\HarddiskVolume1 Value 5 Name: OsLoaderPath Type: REG_SZ Data: \