When a computer is not working properly, there are situations where editing the registry is the best troubleshooting technique.  My primary aim is to give you the skill, the practice, and above all, the confidence to launch regedit and change the registry settings.  My secondary aim is to persuade you to take sensible precautions, for example, export at least that particular branch before editing any registry values.

As usual, I have lots of worked examples, which I urge you to try on your own machine.  Each registry tweak has two aims; to solve a specific problem, and to provide general learning points, which help you to master regedit.  Most of the tweaks work equally well on Vista, XP and Windows Server registries, where there are differences I will explain what happens in each operating system.
Windows Vista Registry Topics

    * What is Vista's Registry?
    * Registry Skills Progression
    * Getting Started: Launch Regedit
    * List of Registry Tweaks for Vista
    * Guy's Five Stages of Registry Hacking
    * Best Practice for Editing the Vista Registry

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Introduction to the Registry

There will be times when your research reveals that there is simply no GUI to configure a particular Vista setting.  Consequently, the only hope of solving the problem is to edit a value in the registry.  Another reason to acquire confidence at editing the registry, is so that you can repair a defec