Editing the Windows Registry (continued...)

WHY WOULD I NEED TO EDIT THE REGISTRY?
There are many different features and characteristics of Windows9x that aren't perfect. Things you may wish you could get rid of, but there's no way. Things you might like to change but the operating system won't allow it. Often times, there are little Registry tweaks that can accomplish these objectives.

There are tons of little tips and tricks, or enhancements to the GUI that can be found on the Web. Some are useful, with the intent of improving your system's performance, and some are only aesthetic. Some are useless little tidbits, presented only because someone figured it out and thought you might like to see how smart they were.

It's like anything else on the Internet, you have to sort out the useful information from the garbage. What you may decide to use, and what you may decide to discard, is entirely up to you.

On the other hand, there are many Registry tweaks that can be extremely useful. As you know, every program has bugs in it. Often times, bug fixes are provided by a company in the form of a Registry edit.

Sometimes, features that should be provided with a program are overlooked in early versions.

Early versions of Netscape had no way of removing recently visited URL entries that were displayed when you clicked the down arrow at the end of the URL Address box. It was possible to locate and remove them through the Registry.

Early versions of Windows95 didn't provide a means of removing individual file names from the 'most recently accessed documents' in the DOCUMENTS portion of the START MENU. These also could be located and removed by editing the Registry.

These features and capabilities were added to later versions of the programs.

When a program is removed incorrectly, or perhaps the computer freezes up during the uninstallation process, you may still see it's name in the "Add/Remove Programs" section of Control Panel. You can remove it by properly searching the Registry and removing the right entry.

Or maybe your computer pauses during boot up and tells you that it can't find a file called 'filename.XYZ'. "It may not be associated with any programs still on your computer, but it's recognized as a required file by your WIN.INI or REGISTRY files", etc.. This is also caused by the improper removal of programs. I've had customers that had to click through 8 or 10 of these messages before Windows would start up; and did it for months! This too, can be fixed by properly searching and removing references to the files in the Registry.

You know, the list goes on and on. But like I mentioned before, it's up to you to decide what may be useful.

(continued...)