From the course: CompTIA A+ (220-902) Cert Prep: 3 Windows Basics

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What is the registry?

What is the registry?

- The Registry is this great mystery inside of every computer, but if you think about it for a minute, it really makes a lot of sense. If you go back a million years, or at least back to versions of Windows, like Windows 95, everything you did within Windows was configured through some form of text file, usually with the extension INI. In fact, Linux users are like, well yeah, that's how everything works, Mike, and there's nothing wrong with using all these different initialization files to configure things, but Microsoft felt a long time ago that life would be a lot easier if instead of using a gazillion text files that were all over the place, if we had one common storage area. That common storage area is the Registry. The Registry is not a text file, it's a database, and you have to have a special reader to be able to read, edit, or do anything you want to this particular database. But, the important thing to appreciate with the Registry is that pretty much everything that is…

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