Tour of Interesting Registry Places, Part I

The Windows Registry was an idea that looked really good on paper and is moderately decent in practice. Over the years, it has become a convoluted place full of no-ops, interesting structures, settings that you can't find anywhere else, and a whole lot of confusing keys. I did a little poking around there today and discovered that it is pretty awesome just to see what you can do there. Let's do a tour!

All you need is a copy of Windows! Even a fresh install should have the structure and a lot of stuff in place. To begin our tour, launch the Registry Editor by typing "regedit" in the Run box (press Windows+R). If you've had it open before, collapse the open keys to start from the beginning.

• HKCU\Environment contains your environment variables. An example of these is PATH. You can add REG_SZ values to allow expansion of %pathvariables% in the Address Bar.
• HKCU\Control Panel\Colors specifies the RGB colors of Windows controls in various states. They are stores as REG_SZ which consist of three numbers (red, green, blue) delimited by spaces. Adding new entries won't do anything.
• HKCU\Control Panel\Mouse contains settings that are usually configured with the Mouse dialog in Control Panel. However, you can also set the rectangle in which a second click in rapid succession will count as a double click, whether the computer will beep when the mouse is clicked, and some other interesting things I don't know about. Most are numbers stored as REG_SZ.
• HKCU\Console changes the visual properties of the command prompt. The most interesting entries are the ones beginning with "ColorTable", for they map the QuickBASIC/DOS 16 colors to RGB Windows colors. They are stored as REG_DWORD with only the last six hex digits used. Boolean flags in this folder are also REG_DWORD, simply 0x0 or 0x1.

As I continue exploring, I will write more!