Hello, and welcome to a free computer tutorial lesson brought to you by beyourownit.com. So, this one’s right out of our free computer training program. It’s lesson number 15 in the “Sound and Registry Editor.” There’s a lot of great information within this particular lesson. But we’re going to try to just hit the highlights. And the reason for that is, some of it gets pretty technical. And you’re going to want to read at it and take a look at the pictures. But in our 10 plus years of computer repair, we’ve pretty much only used the registry editor as something to remove viruses or faulty software that may be just causing issues, just basically from a trouble shooting standpoint. There are ways to use it to optimize your computer. Things like other software completely dedicated to registry editing software.

But to tell you a little bit about it, to run it, all you need to do is go to start. Choose run, just like if you were going to choose to run msconfig. This is a picture of what you’ll basically see. You’ll see several categories: hkey‑‑classes‑‑root, current‑‑user/local‑‑machine, which is where you will do most of your local edits in if you ever need to. And USERS, hkey‑‑users and current‑‑config.

It’s important to this lesson as well, while we’re talking about it. At this point we need to mention that you always back up your registry. It’s always very simple task, but if you’re ever going to change anything in the registry, your computer’s registry, make sure you back it up first.

And the process is very easy. First you need to choose the file option then export. Below it you’ll see an option where you can choose the export range. And make sure you select all.

So, I’ll show you what that looks like.

File export. And you can name it. Now make sure you put in a place where you’ll remember it. And then you can select the range “all.” That way, you’ll have a good backup of your entire registry. Once you’ve backed it up, you can make particular trouble‑shooting changes, some very quick easy tips to use in the registry. If you’re looking for a particular entry, you can use the F3 on your keyboard and search for it. And then I’ll search for it. And then, you can hit F3 again. Or F2 to edit it, I’m sorry. Or F3 to search for the next one that’ll match your query.

For example, you remove Norton Antivirus. This used to be a pretty common procedure.

And it would still be littering the computer’s registry. And you wanted to go in there and remove all the Norton entries. Well, nowadays there’s an actual utility that does that. But back then, I would type in something like “Symantec” or “Norton” and go all the way back through the registry and manually remove it.

If you have a piece of software or an error that you’re getting when your computer boots up, oftentimes you’ll want to open the registry editor. Use the search function. Search for the entry and maybe you need to remove it. Or you need to find out exactly what it is, that’s where you’ll find it.

It’s important to remember the registry is a database, so you can cause a lot of issues if you accidentally delete something that doesn’t need to be deleted. And that’s why we always say to back up your registry.

So, you’ll find a little bit more about your registry in our lesson. But that’s a brief overview. And just be careful.

If you’re going to be in there editing your own registry, make sure that you know what you’re doing. Thanks and we’ll see you in the next lesson.