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The fascinating story of the Windows Registry

By Sydney Butler

The fascinating story of the Windows Registry

Key Takeaways

Before the Registry, settings were in scattered text files The Registry was introduced with Windows 3.1, centralizing system settings The Registry is a good idea for organization, efficiency, and security

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The word "Registry" can strike fear into the hearts of Windows users, because it means digging through a database of seemingly arcane settings in order to troubleshoot or modify something that you wish could just be done using a normal dialog box. However, the Registry was a crucial innovation for Windows which doesn't get enough credit.

Before the Registry, there was chaos

Settings, settings, everywhere

In the days before the Windows Registry, application settings were stored in text files, usually with an ".ini" or ".cfg" extension. These were plain text, and were formatted internally in whichever way the app developer liked. Of course, standard conventions did evolve, but no software creator was bound to follow them if they didn't want to.

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When you make setting changes within an app, the software simply modifies the values in its config files. This also meant you could use an applet like Notepad to edit these files directly. So far, so simple.

When using text files to store settings like this, there were more than a few problems that popped up. The biggest problem is that these files were all over the place. They could be in the Applications folder, or in some other spot where the developer decided to store them. Another issue was that the sheer number of settings an app would have to put in its files became unmanageable. If you open one of these text files, only to be faced with hundreds of lines of text, that wouldn't really be conducive to easy troubleshooting or configuration.

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It's also hard to arrange config files in a hierarchical structure, or to create one inside a text file. Also, having different user profiles is pretty tricky using nothing but text files with settings in them.

These weren't the only issues, but it became clear that settings files wouldn't scale up well for the future software needs within Windows in the years to come.

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The Registry was born

Sewing it all up neatly

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The Registry was introduced with Windows 3.1, which also happens to be the first version of Windows that I used. However, this first iteration of the Registry wasn't quite as we know it today. Instead of holding system-wide settings in a central database, the first version of the Registry was tasked with keeping track of file associations and object linking records.

While UNIX-like operating systems don't have a direct parallel to the Windows Registry, GNOME does have dconf , which also stores settings in a central place.

This laid the groundwork for what the Registry would later become. It was a central place to store records that would cross app boundaries. This made it perfect to adapt as a place which could hold apps and system settings within the OS. So, with Windows 95, the Registry became the beating heart of Windows itself. It was a centralized, hierarchical database, keeping track of system-wide and per-user settings.

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The Registry almost (but not quite) took over for config files. You'll still find config files in modern software, such as video games, which allow you to tweak certain settings manually in a human-readable format. For the most part, however, settings are kept in the Registry.

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Why the Registry is a good idea

It deserves our love

While other operating systems have their own solutions to the problems that the Registry is meant to solve, overall, it's been a pretty great solution that's still a part of Windows today and is unlikely to go anywhere soon.

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Since the Registry is hierarchical, you can use nested keys and values. It makes it easier for app developers to organize their settings into something that makes sense. And for the rest of us, it makes it easier to find things, or to puzzle out where they should logically be.

Registry data is stored more efficiently than ASCII text, which makes a difference when you have literally millions of values to read and write. While this makes things less human-readable, it's way more efficient and performant than text files.

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Perhaps the most important aspect of the Registry is security and integrity. With everything in a central database, it's much easier to ensure that only legitimate programs access and modify settings. The settings in the Registry are critical for the OS and its apps to work correctly, so malware or simple human error could really mess up your day. Which brings up another great advantage! Because the Registry is a central database, you can make a backup of the whole thing.

Of course, the flipside of this is that if something does make it past these protections and into the Registry, it can just wipe the floor with your system.

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The Registry got a bad rap

If you've spent a lot of time making use of Windows troubleshooting guides (and who hasn't?), then you're familiar with the mantras around the Registry. "Don't mess with the Registry," "Don't use Registry cleaning apps," and so on. For many casual Windows users, the Registry has taken on an almost mystical aura. Here be dragons! I'm not even immune from releasing a small groan when a guide includes a step which tells me to edit the Registry.

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Yet, objectively, it's not nearly as terrifying as some people think, and we'd all be much worse off if Windows didn't have a Registry. So here's a nod to Windows' most misunderstood component, and may it have many more years of service ahead.

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