[ guide | article ] Registry Tweaks

[Vadikan]

The idea behind importing the registry tweaks during unattended installation is that you won't have to tweak the system manually or with a tweaker afterwards. You will already have all your favorite tweaks imported into the registry upon the first logon. Perhaps, the classic tweak is to speed up the appearance of the Start menu elements, because they are indeed slow to open by default. You probably know, that opening the Registry editor (regedit.exe), navigating to the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop key and modifying the value of the MenuShowDelay parameter from 400 to, say, 20 does the trick.

However, there's an alternative way.

Read more...

Edited December 26, 2005 by Vadikan

[keytotime]

Very Nice

[The Black Cloud]

thanks VAD

[mzar720]

Thanks [VAD] ...Great Guide for beginners like me.

Edited November 19, 2005 by mzar720

[Vadikan]

Thanks for you kind comments, guys

[pkuwyc]

thx very much, VAD :-)

gr8 job!!

[Aaron_]

Nice info!

This will help people understand about registry tweaks.

[glent]

Nice info ,maybe we could merge this thread with Registry tweaks PT3

mods & Admin?

[prathapml]

Merging with that topic wont help. Atleast this way, it will be visible independantly (in forum topic list, or in searches).

Thanks VAD!

[glent]

Good point prathapml

[Vadikan]

@glent

You can add the link to this guide in first post of the "Registry Tweaks Pt3" thread. It may help a little bit, if people ask how to apply the tweaks in the thread. In addition, one can just reply with the link to this guide instead of sending to search or going thru the basics

[ccc]

There's a sticky registry tweaks thread in the Unattended forum at MSFN. The first post of this thread has a text file attached with numerous registry tweaks.

Guess that means this thread "Registry Tweaks Pt 3" and the "Registry_Tweaks_10_10_05.rar" file.

Thanks

[Vadikan]

@ccc

Your guess is correct. The thread you're reading was not sticky at the time the quoted post was made

[Takeshi]

I have a few comments.

Well-known security identifiers in Windows operating systems

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?...kb;en-us;243330

The KB doesn't mention S-1-5-21-SID. It refers to the user currently logged on and is incorporated into HKCR. If you use secondary logon, there will be another set of S-1-5-21-SID and S-1-5-21-SID_classes keys.

SIDs are different among different users and between installations.

HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT:

.DEFAULT contains the per-user settings that Win XP uses to display the desktop before any user logs on to the computer. This isn't the same thing as a default user profile...

from Jerry Honeycutt, Microsoft Windows XP Registry Guide, MS Press: strongly recommended reading for those interested in the registry.

This means the HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT hive in system32\config\default is not necessarily identical to the NTUSER.DAT hive in the Default User profile. Load the latter and compare it with the former.

If you want changes which only affect your own account and not all accounts, then you must only import the reg when you're logged on. I can't see any other easy way to do it.

Does anyone know:

When are the Default User, Default and other hives created during Setup? And from which files in i386?

There's only a SETUPREG.HIV in i386 and this contains the CurrentControlSet001 which will be formed under HKLM\SYSTEM eventually.

[Alanoll]

Vadikan's article can now be read at http://unattended.msfn.org/unattended.xp/view/web/17/

so i'm unpinning this topic