One mistake in your Windows Registry can be catastrophic, or it can just cause some small glitch with one of your programs, depending on where an error in it occurs. It is a good idea to back it up, and sometimes it becomes necessary to edit the registry yourself to correct some error. In that case you can also back up individual keys before making your changes.

You won't find the registry editor on the menu anywhere in Windows, nor will you find the built in registry back up tools on any menus, probably because that would simply be too easy to find, so you have to poke around to find them, or do some research to find out where they are.

In Windows XP the registry editor is the file regedit.exe in the Windows folder. There are a couple of ways to start it. The most recommended method is really the hard way, and that is to click Start, Run, and type in regedit.exe, then hit enter. It's a bit easier to just add the registry editor to your menu system somewhere, possibly on the Quick Launch bar.

To add the registry editor to your menu, or Quick Launch bar you will need to create a shortcut. The fastest way to do this, is to open My Computer, navigate to the Windows folder, find the regedit.exe file, right click it, and select Create Shortcut from the context menu.

You will now have a shortcut to the registry editor in your Windows folder, with the name regedit.exe. Right click it, and select Rename, get rid of the .exe on the end of it's name, and possibly change regedit to Registry Editor depending on your preferences in naming menu items. Now right click it, and select Cut from the context menu.

You will now have the shortcut in your clipboard, and can navigate to any point in your menu folders, and paste it in. To paste it to the Quick Launch bar, simply right click any blank spot on the Quick Launch bar, and select Paste from it's context menu. This will not clear it from the clipboard, so you can paste it to several locations if you wish.

In Windows 2000, or other versions of Windows the Registry Editor's executable file is named regedt32.exe. Other than that one small fact, the rest of the steps above are the same to use it as well.

Before editing the registry it s a very good idea to make a backup of it, or at the very least backup the individual keys you are going to change. To backup a single registry key click it in the registry editor to select it, then select File, Export from the registry editor's menu. You will be presented with a file save dialog, wherein you will need to give the key's backup file a name that ends in the extension .reg. Make the name descriptive so you can tell which registry key it is for.

To restore that key to it's original value after making changes, you simply need to double click the .reg file you created with Export, which will restore that value to the registry. The .reg files are simply text files, which you can edit in your favorite text editor as well.

You can also select multiple keys in the registry editor by holding down the control key while selecting keys with your mouse, and export a .reg file which will restore all of them at once.

To backup the entire registry surf to the link below for your version of Windows.

• Windows 95 and 98
• Windows XP, and Vista
• Windows 2000

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