Take a moment to fill out our quick survey, and earn a free utility in the process. Since the introduction of Windows 95 around two years ago, many people have become aware of the system registry. The registry contains a large amount of data about your system, including configuration settings and program information. The bulk of this data comes from two files, system.dat and user.dat , both of which are found in the Windows directory. The registry is made up of two components, keys and values.
All values are in one of three different formats, and most can be viewed and changed by the user.
As far as the major keys go, there are six of them. There are three root keys and three aliases that point to other parts of the registry. This key includes information about the current user, including user display preferences and user customizations. This key also contains data for all users in general. This key contains information for all currently installed software.