The Registry Hacks
In my previous blog, I have stated the basic understanding of the Registry Editor. Now it’s time to edit the Registry practically.
Here are some of the useful hacks in order to understand the power of registry editing
Automatically Close Programs at Shutdown
To have Windows automatically close programs at shutdown, run the Registry Editor, and go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop. Edit the AutoEndTasks key so that is has a value of 1. If the key doesn’t exist, create it as a DWORD value and give it the value of 1. To disable it, either delete
the key, or set the value to 0.
Disable Shutdown
Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer. (In Win7, you may need to create the Explorer key.) Create a new DWORD value named NoClose with a data value of 1. Exit the Registry, and reboot for the change to take effect. You won’t be able to shut down Windows in the normal manner from now on; you’ll have to do using the Task Manager’s Shut
Down menu to close Windows. If this doesn’t work, delete the NoClose value and re enable normal shutdowns. In my practice I didn’t had to restart my computer to activate and I had to delete the key to deactivate this feature.
Change the Names of the Registered User and Company
Run the Registry Editor, go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion, and look for the values RegisteredOwner and RegisteredOrganization. Edit their value data to whatever username and company name you want. This is normally available in those PCs which are loaded with the OS (like Windows 7 Home Premium) by the company itself.
Change the Amount of Time Before Programs Time Out
When an application hangs and might not respond for long as it might be doing heavy calculations in the background and won’t respond until the calculation is done. We can do registry hack to increase of decrease the amount of time it takes before Windows reports that the program has hung.
Run the Registry Editor, and go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop. Select the HungAppTimeout entry, and put in a new value (in milliseconds) If the entry does not exist, create it as a DWORD value. The default is 5000. Exit the Registry. You might need to reboot for the new setting to take effect. Try increasing the number in increments of 1,000 until you find a number that works.
Disable the Disk Cleanup Warning
If your hard disk has what Windows decides is too little space left on it, the operating system will pop up a warning and recommend that you run Disk Cleanup. But you might be like me and not want a virtual nanny nagging you to clean up your mess. You can turn off the warning with a Registry hack. Run the Registry Editor, and go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\
CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer. (In Win7, you may need to create the Explorer key.) Create a DWORD value called NoLowDiskSpaceChecks and give it a value of 1. Exit the Registry, and reboot. Case solved.
**Avert disaster by backing up the Registry so that you’ll
always be able to revert to a clean copy.