Windows Registry Cleaners

What are registry hives, registry keys and registry values?

You might have come across these terms before. Don’t get confused by the terminology of Microsoft. Let us find out about each of these terms.
Registry Hives
The windows registry is divided into a number of hives. The registry hive is a logical section which contains registry keys and values that has supporting files which contains its data backups.

Registry Keys and Values
Keys and values are the two basic elements in a windows registry. Windows registry keys can be considered as folders with values. Similar to folders each registry key can contain subkeys. The subkeys also may contain subkeys, kust like sub-folders can contain folders inside them.
Registry Values are data pairs stored within windows registry keys.

Do not get overwhelmed all these technical stuff. Let’s see examples to get a clear idea.

• HKEY_CURRENT_CONFIG is an example of Registry Hive
• HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\ is an example of a registry key

The windows registry is a central hierarchical database used in windows operating systems which stores the settings and options for one or more users. The windows registry contains information to configure the system which includes settings for application software installed on the computer, hardware components of the computer, operating system software, individual user settings and ports that are in use.

The versions prior to 3.1of Microsoft windows operating system used text based .ini files and MS Dos configuration files to store these information. In fact when Windows registry was first introduced its function was to organize the large amount of per-program ini files that had earlier been used to store config settings for Windows applications. The windows registry in Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 replaces most of the ini files and DOS config files.