Better Registry Searchingby Mitch Tulloch The registry is the
central repository where Windows stores almost all per-machine
and per-user configuration settings, both for the operating
system itself and for applications you install on your computer.
Sometimes you need to find some specific key or value in the
registry in order to tweak Windows in some way or configure an
application setting that isn't available from the user
interface. How do you find things in the registry? By searching,
of course. Unfortunately, the search capabilities of Registry
Editor ( regedit.exe) are somewhat limited. For one thing, using
Edit -> Find to search for a particular registry key, value, or
data can take some time. On a Pentium 4 3.2GHz machine with a
bare-bones Windows installation, searching the entire registry
for a random string takes about 15 seconds. On another machine,
with a Pentium 4 3.0GHz hyperthreaded processor and lots of
applications installed, including Microsoft Office Professional,
the same search takes mor