Or, perhaps you??™ve spent the last six months gradually customizing your file
types (covered later in this chapter), only to find that a newly installed application
or a Windows upgrade erased all your hard work and reset all your
context menus. All you need to do is to make a Registry patch containing all
your saved file types, and then reapply it should the need arise.
Create a Registry patch
1. Open the Registry Editor, and select a branch you wish to export.
The branch can be anywhere from one of the top-level
branches to a branch a dozen layers deep. Registry patches
include not only the branch you select, but all of the values
and subkeys in the branch. Don??™t select anything more than
what you absolutely need.
2. From the File menu, select Export, type a filename and choose a destination
folder, and click OK. All of the values and subkeys in the selected
branch will then be stored in the patch file. Make sure the filename of
the new Registry patch has the .reg extension.
Clearly, there??™s not much to making Registry patches with the Registry Editor.
But it gets a little more interesting when you modify them, or even create
them from scratch to automate Registry changes.
Edit a Registry patch
Since a Registry patch is just a plain-text file, you can edit it with any decent
plain-text editor, or lacking that, Notepad (notepad.exe). The contents of the
Registry patch will look something like the text shown in Example 3-1.
Pages:
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172