You??™ll eventually find that everything you??™ll want to do with the Registry can
be done in either HKEY_CURRENT_USER or HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE.
The Structure of the Registry | 89
The Registry
The Meat of the Registry: Values
Values are where Registry data is actually stored (while keys are simply used
to organize values). The Registry uses several types of values??”eight in all??”
each appropriate to the type of data it is meant to hold. Each type is known
by at least two different names, the common name and the symbolic name
(shown in parentheses in Table 3-1).
Although the Registry Editor allows you to view and edit all eight types of
values, it is only capable of creating the six most common (and not surprisingly,
most useful) types. In practice, you??™ll typically only create string,
binary, and DWORD values.
String values
String values contain strings of characters, more commonly known as
plain text. Most values of interest to you will end up being string values;
they??™re the easiest to edit and are usually in plain English. To edit a
string value, just double-click, type a string of text into the text field
(Figure 3-3), and click OK when you??™re done.
Table 3-1. Value types visible in the Registry Editor
Value type
Icon used
in RegEdit
Can be created
in RegEdit?
String (REG_SZ) Yes
Multistring/string array (REG_MULTI_SZ) Yes
Expandable string (REG_EXPAND_SZ) Yes
Binary (REG_BINARY) Yes
DWORD 32-Bit (REG_DWORD) Yes
DWORD 64-Bit (REG_QWORD) Yes
DWORD (REG_DWORD_BIGENDIAN) No
Resource List (REG_RESOURCE_LIST, REG_RESOURCE_REQUIREMENTS_LIST,
or FULL_RESOURCE_DESCRIPTOR)
No
90 | Chapter 3: The Registry
In addition to standard strings, there are two far less common string
variants, used for special purposes:
??? Multistring/string array values contain several strings, concatenated
(glued) together and separated by null characters.
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