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Windows Registry Repairing
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The Windows Registry - Its Origins and
Purposes
Way back in the days when computer screens were mostly monochrome
and DOS was the OS on the rise, DOS programs had configuration
files. They were often called .cfg files, and they were whatever
format the programmer that created the application chose to use,
whether it was a binary dump of configuration parameters from the
program, or a human-editable text file with simple configuration
pairs.
This situation persisted – and confused users – until Windows came
along. Microsoft included in their standard libraries some routines
that would help programmers create configuration files that were
consistent and simple to use. These files were called .ini files,
and programs would read them in when they initialized (this .ini)
and load the values stored there. They were generally
human-readable, and in many cases, human editable, and they had a
consistent format that meant once you learned how to edit .ini
files, you could pretty much edit any .ini file.
Except not all programmers followed the new rules. Some chose to use
the .ini extension – without using the provided facilities to create
and save or read them. It was also extremely common for people to
edit .ini files poorly, leaving programs, or in some cases, Windows
itself, unable to start up properly. The .ini file was better than
the .cfg file, on the whole, but it still introduced a large number
of new problems along with a few of the same old problems.
The outgrowth of this situation was the Windows Registry, that
appeared in the first “32 bit” (sort of) implementation of Windows,
when DOS and the GUI were unified into Windows 95. It’s a database,
really, that stores certain types of data pairs, called Keys/Value
pairs, in a hierarchically organized structure that resembles a file
system hierarchy. It’s divided into blocks of data called ‘Hives’ -
Security, Software, System, and SAM are the four most commonly
discussed hives. These hives are stored in files in the C:\Windows
directory. The Registry provided several benefits. It made the
system-wide configuration interface for programs very simple to use
and access, and saved them the trouble of ‘writing to disk’ or
‘reading from disk’. It is backed up each successful boot, so
configurations can be rolled back. It’s a central clearing house for
configuration information about programs and Windows itself. But
there are also some problems.
The
primary problem with the monolithic configuration registry is that
if it becomes corrupt, it breaks many programs – if not all of
them. A corrupt registry can cause Windows to fail to boot, or cause
it to boot incorrectly, or render any number of programs
inoperable. Corruption in some places can cause intermittent
operational problems. This is why a crowd of programs designed to
help manage the registry have proliferated since the Registry
appeared August 24th, 1995 (in Windows 95). Windows’
Registry management has improved significantly since then, but the
tools designed to help maintain the health of one’s system registry
are still valuable to most users.
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Related
What Is the Windows
Registry and Why Does It Need Fixing?
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