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The registry is intended to be used for storing very small pieces of information (such as user preferences for a particular application) rather than whole documents.
Some very old applications (plus unix apps like apache) store this kind of stuff in an INI file. Most modern windows apps use the registry instead of using INI files. A disadvantage of INI files, is that you need to tell the application where the INI file is, and that inforamation needs to be stored somewhere ... Chicken and egg. When applications use the registry, it always use the same location within the registry. Windows itself uses the registry for most of its internal settings.
There is a rough correspondence of terms used when referring to registry and file access. A drive is roughly equivalent to a registry hive, a folder is like a registry key, and a file is like a registry value.
Security can be set to limit access toregistry keys and values in much the same way that it can be done with folders and files.
In the windows NT registry, there are 4 hives already created with specific uses in mind
HKEY_Local_Machine - stores information about the local PC
HKEY_Current_User - stores information about the user currently logged in and their preferences.
HKEY_Classes_Root - provides a description of the file types being used and how to handle them (eg if user clicks on a file
ending with .XLS then load Excel)
HKEY_Users - information about other users on the system.
If you want to browse the registry, use Start / Run , and type regedit. Be careful changing stuff here, as the registry editor doesn't check to see if you're making changes that will cause errors.
Physically the registry exists in about 4 files on the file system somwhere. I can't remember what their called, but it doesn't matter becuase one would never manipulate the registry by altering the files directly. There are lots of ways of accessing the registry either manually or programatically. The easiest method to get used to first, is to use regedit.