See
Figure 3-4 for an example.
Figure 3-3. Edit a string value by typing text into this box
The Structure of the Registry | 91
The Registry
You can type hex codes on the left side or normal ASCII
characters on the right, depending on where you click with
the mouse.
The purpose of binary values is to hold data that couldn??™t be easily represented
by ordinary string values. As such, binary values are much less
likely to contain readable text (despite the example value in Figure 3-4),
but rather simply raw data. Of course, the format and purpose of the
data in any given binary value depends entirely on the application that
created it.
DWORD values
Essentially, a DWORD is a number. Often, the contents of a DWORD
value are easy to understand, such as 0 for no and 1 for yes, or 161 for
the number of seconds it took you to solve your best game of Sudoku. A
DWORD value is used where only numerical digits are allowed,
whereas a string or binary value can contain anything.
In the DWORD value editor (Figure 3-5), you can change the base of
the number displayed (think back to your grade-school math). For
instance, the number 64 in hexadecimal (also known as base 16) is equal
to 100 in decimal (base 10).
Figure 3-4. Binary values are entered differently from the common string values, but the
contents are sometimes nearly as readable
92 | Chapter 3: The Registry
Type the number in the wrong base, and you??™ll unwittingly
be entering the wrong value.
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