Microsoft Windows Registry Guide, Second Edition

Some Terminology

Most of the terminology that I use in this book is fairly standard by now, but to avoid confusion, I'll take a moment to describe how I use some of it.

Rather than give you hardcoded paths, I instead use the standard environment variables that represent those paths. That way, when you read the instructions, you'll be able to apply them to your scenario regardless of whether you're using a dual-boot configuration and regardless of where on your computer user profiles exist: C:\Documents and Settings or C:\Winnt\Profiles. Additionally, on your computer, the folder that contains the Windows system files might be in a different location depending on whether you upgraded to Windows, installed a clean copy of the operating system, or customized the installation path in an answer file. Thus, I use the following environment variables throughout this book. (You can see these environment variables by typing set in a command prompt window.)

• %UserProfile% represents the current user profile folder. Thus, if you log on to the computer as Jerry and your profile folders are in C:\Documents and Settings, you'd translate %UserProfile% to C:\Documents and Settings\Jerry.

• %SystemDrive% is the drive that contains the Windows system files. That's usually drive C, but if you installed Windows on a different drive, perhaps in a dual-boot configuration, it could be drive D, E, and so on.

• %SystemRoot% is the folder containing Windows. In a clean installation, this is usually C:\Windows, but if you upgraded from Windows NT or Windows 2000, it's probably C:\Winnt.

In addition to environment variables, I also use abbreviations for the various root keys in the registry. HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE are unwieldy, for example, and cause lines of text to wrap in odd places. To make the book more readable, I use the following abbreviations: