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CompTIA A+ Certification All-in-One Exam Guide

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without it.

Every version of Windows stores the numerous Registry files (called

hives) in the \%SystemRoot%\System32\config folder and each user account

folder. Fortunately, you rarely have to access these files directly. Instead, you

can use a set of relatively tech-friendly applications to edit the Registry.

Surprisingly, the CompTIA A+ 1002 exam does not have an objective

covering the Windows Registry. Every competent tech should, however,

understand the basic components of the Registry, know how to edit the

Registry manually, and know the best way to locate a particular Registry

setting. CompTIA, include this objective!

Accessing the Registry

Even though the Registry is important, you rarely access the Registry

directly. Instead, when you use Windows’ Settings or Control Panel (or just

about any other utility), you are editing the Registry. There are some

situations where a tech might need to access the Registry directly.

Before you look in the Registry, let’s look at how you access the Registry

directly by using the Registry Editor, so you can open the Registry on your

machine and compare what you see to the examples in this chapter. The go-to

command to open the Registry Editor is regedit. To open the Registry Editor,

enter regedit in the Start | Search bar. This will also run from the command

line.

Registry Components

The Registry is organized in a tree structure similar to the folders on the file

system. Once you open the Registry Editor in Windows, you will see five

main subgroups, or root keys:

• HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT

• HKEY_CURRENT_USER

• HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE

• HKEY_USERS

• HKEY_CURRENT_CONFIG

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