Hello and welcome to Computer Fitness’ Blog! My name is Josh. You may know me from the Internet Beacon. We have a pretty cool blog over there. If you’re new to our sites, do check it out; there’s plenty more awesome over there. Computer Fitness is a tech support firm in Finksburg, MD. Our areas of expertise run the gamut from desktop repair to server maintenance.

Let me begin with this, playing around in the registry is a terrible idea if you don’t know what you’re doing. You can do an incredible amount of damage to your system, perhaps irrevocably damaging it, if you start making changes here. Now that the warning is out of the way, let me give you a brief rundown of what the Registry does.

The registry is a part of the Windows operating system in which files and system settings are stored in a list. Some of the settings are edited with Control Panel. This is to prevent you from having to dig around in the Registry to change the simple things. However, they are all tied into the Registry.

The registry is formulated as a tree, so there are items are expandable to get to more settings. In this sense it is granular. You can get to very specific items. However, this also means navigating through this item can be tricky. Again, messing around in here is not something to do unless you have a great understanding of what can be done here.

The reason I bring this up is because sometimes viruses and malware will create items in here. Because of this, it is important to make sure that whatever anti-virus software you use will need to scan the registry. The software will do this for you, so there’s no need to get into this one your own. For those more in the know, here is a link to some tips from Microsoft.

That’s all for this week. Come back again for more Computer Fitness tips.

-Josh
Computer Fitness
Onsite and Remote Tech Support