The Windows Registry on your computer system holds all of the most important information about your system. It holds information about what kind of software is installed on the system, what kind of hardware you are using, and your Windows settings and how you have it set up. Problems and corruptions in your registry can cause your computer to act crazy and crash, so it is a good idea to make a back up copy of your Windows Registry while your computer

is running really well – that way, you have a good copy to use if you should happen to run into problems later.

Your registry is held in two files, system.dat and user.dat. To be more thorough, though, you should also back up your win.ini and system.ini files, as these files control how Windows starts up and also hold additional important and useful information for you. Your system.dat and user.dat files are, by default, hidden files – that means you can't actually see them unless your computer is set to show hidden files. To show hidden files:

1.)    Open up a Windows Explorer window
2.)    Go to View
3.)    Go to Folder Options, then View again
4.)    Select the Show All Files option

Now you can see these files when you look in your C:/ drive. Once all of your files are visible, you are ready to start backing them up. There are two ways you can go about doing this. The easiest and simplest way is to just copy the files and saving them somewhere else, whether you put them on an external hard drive, a CD or DVD disk, or even just another folder on your hard drive. Just right click on each file, select “copy” and then go to the new location and paste the file there. If you do this, make sure you are only COPYING the file and not actually MOVING the file, or you are going to mess things up in a serious way!

You can also create a back up by booting your computer into Command Prompt Only mode. As your computer boots up, press F8 until the screen comes up, and choose “Command Prompt Only” as your boot option. Then you can type the following commands, the words in BOLD, into Command Prompt when it opens to back up your registry. Do it exactly as follows!

cd c:\
mkdir backup
cd c:\windows
attrib user.dat -h -r
attrib system.dat -h -r
copy user.dat c:\backup
copy system.dat c:\backup
copy win.ini c:\backup
copy system.ini c:\backup
attrib user.dat +h +r
attrib system.dat +h +r

This will make the files unhidden and unrestricted, back them up to a backup file, and then hide them again for you, and your registry will be safe and sound and ready for you if you should ever need to restore it.