The idea is to take ???snapshots??? of your entire Registry before and after you
make a change in Windows. By comparing the two snapshots, you can easily
see which Registry keys and values were affected. Here??™s how you do it:
1. Close all applications except the one you wish to examine. Any unnecessary
running applications??”including those in the system tray/notification
area??”could write to the Registry at any time, adding unexpected changes.
2. Open the Registry Editor, and select the HKEY_CURRENT_USER branch.
3. Select Export from the Registry menu. Type User1.reg for the filename,
select your desktop or another convenient location to put the file, and
click Save to export the entire branch to the file.
4. Next, select the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE branch and repeat step 3, exporting
it instead to Machine1.reg.
100 | Chapter 3: The Registry
Although the Registry has five main branches, the others are
simply ???mirrors,??? or symbolic links of portions of HKEY_
CURRENT_USER and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE. See ???The Structure of
the Registry,??? earlier in this chapter, for details.
5. Now make the change you want to track.
For instance, say you want to find the value responsible for showing
hidden files in Windows Explorer. In this case, you??™d go to Control
Panel ??? Folder Options, choose the View tab, and in the Advanced Settings
list, turn on the Hidden Files and Folders option. Click OK when
you??™re done.
6. Immediately??”and before doing anything else??”switch back to the Registry
Editor, and re-export the HKEY_CURRENT_USER and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
branches into new files named User2.
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