Of course, you need to be signed in to your Windows operating system as an administrator to be able to run the Registry Editor with elevated privileges. However, the more elaborate answer will depend on the problem you are trying to troubleshoot. Once you have taken a backup of the registry using one of the methods below, reboot your computer into Safe Mode before you begin troubleshooting. To retrieve any data from the Registry, the static OpenSubKey method of the Registry class is used that returns aRegistryKey instance of the given subkey. If the object is not null (in case the given subkey doesn’t exist), we can start retrieving the values by calling the GetValue method that takes just one argument, the key name. This root element holds all the user profiles used on the machine. Even though it can be edited, you should be very cautious when doing so.

You can load these individually and mount them to the root of the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE key. Microsoft suggested both ways, because they have different capabilities. For example if you create some application for using in Active Directory, you can easily modify settings for thousands computers, even your application installed to different directories.

Account Information

Let’s consider another scenario that can be used when you need to deploy a reg file with a large number of registry settings to all computers in the domain. Instead of creating individual registry settings manually in the GPP editor, you can import the reg file with the settings via the GPO startup script. ¶Registry entries subordinate to this key define the preferences of the current user. These preferences include the settings of environment variables, data about program groups, colors, printers, network connections, and application preferences. Sometimes, you might need to delete an unwanted registry key or value that could’ve been added by some unwanted program.

• To guarantee cleanup, you can call either theClose() method on the object, or the CloseKey() function.
• Below the subtrees, the Registry is arranged in keys, such as HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM, and subkeys.
• You should only download and run .reg files from sources you trust, but they’re text files, so you can right-click them and open them in Notepad.
• You’ll be prompted to upload your image when you submit the comment.

Save the file in a location that’s easy to find with a descriptive name and using the how to fix missing msvcp140.dll .reg extension (for example, enableRegsitry.reg). Repeat the steps described above on every account in which you don’t want users to mess with the Registry.

Windows as a developer machine

For the sake of simple organization and user readability, the Registry Keys are, perhaps, the most important facet of the Windows Registry. A registry key can be thought of as being a bit like a file folder, but it exists only in the Windows Registry. Registry keys contain registry values, just like folders contain files. Registry keys can also contain other registry keys, which are sometimes referred to as subkeys. If you spend any amount of time browsing Windows-tweaking web sites, you’ve undoubtedly come across a downloadable .reg file that somebody provides as a way to quickly add a setting to the registry. There are a number of methods for editing the registry, but most of the time you’ll just use the regedit.exe utility to make changes, which you can launch from the start menu search or run boxes. (Hit Win+R, paste regedit.exe, then hit Enter and you’re there.) Once you’ve opened up the editor, you’ll be presented with a tree view of keys on the left-hand side, and the values on the right.