The Windows® 98 Registry [Paperback]

John Woram (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1558285911 | ISBN-13: 978-1558285910 | Publication Date: December 24, 1998 | Edition: 1

Now you can ignore the ominous warnings and set your registry fears aside thanks to John Woram's new book, The Windows 98 Registry: A Survival Guide For Users. Despite Microsoft's well-documented recommendations to not configure, customize, or in any way alter registry files, Woram demonstrates how the Windows registry is the most effective way to optimize your PC.

The Windows 98 Registry: A Survival Guide For Users explains how to repair a corrupted registry, troubleshoot common problems, remove leftovers," and edit INI files. Woram also includes a complete blueprint of the six HKEYs and an appendix dedicated to Tweak UI and the registry. So temper your registry trepidation with The Windows 98 Registry: A Survival Guide For Users and start getting the most out of your Windows PC.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

"The Registry book of choice for power users." — PC Magazine Extensive list of Registry error messages included! Caution: Using the Registry Editor can cause serious improvements! For all of Microsoft's warnings about editing the Registry, it remains the most powerful, the most versatile — and often, the only — way to troubleshoot and customize your Windows PC. Try it! With the expert advice of Registry guru John Woram, you'll quickly gain the know-how you need to navigate the maze of HKEYs, subkeys, and data strings with complete confidence. Clearly organized and well illustrated, The Windows^® 98 Registry takes the mystery out of the Registry, giving you a clear, detailed roadmap and straight-forward directions.

• Get a full roadmap of the six HKEYs
• Find and edit Registry keys with RegEdit
• Remove Registry "leftovers"
• Edit the Registry safely
• Customize and optimize Windows 98 and Windows 95
• Troubleshoot and repair a corrupted Registry
• Survive configuration disasters
• Use TweakUI to watch the Registry in action

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About the Author

About the Author John Woram is Consulting Editor for Windows Magazine, where he writes the monthly "Optimize Windows" column. He is the author of the extremely successful PC Configuration Handbook, which has sold over 250,000 copies and has been translated into six foreign languages. His previous book, The Windows^® 95 Registry, was a finalist for the 1996 Computer Press Association's "How-To Book" award.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 446 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (December 24, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1558285911
• ISBN-13: 978-1558285910
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,590,175 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

John Woram (seen here in Chile's Torres del Paine National Park) is a recovering recording engineer (RCA & Vanguard) who eventually wandered into the computer industry, where he was monthly columnist for Windows Magazine and -- among his 10 books -- wrote two about the Windows registry. His latest books have been on travel and exploration in Galápagos, Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Look elsewhere..., September 16, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Windows® 98 Registry (Paperback)

I agree with the previous review. Seemingly comprehensive but how do you get through it? Very poorly written. Compare his writing skills to Paul McFedries, for example, an excellent writer. A better book on the Win 98 Registry has to be out there.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars No Better Resource, October 12, 2006

By 

texastigger (Texas) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Windows® 98 Registry (Paperback)

I'll use the previous reviewers words... "This book, while comprehensive, is not written for your average user". Unfortunate for some, fortunate for others, this book presupposes a certain level of knowledge. If you don't have it then you may have difficulty with comprehension. The prior reviewer gives the perfect example; the first sentence quoted is meant as a joke! It humorously conveys the confusion most people run into while dealing with complex computer and computer resource issues. Mr. Woram's writing has an amusing witty bite that not everyone can appreciate. If you can, then you will find no better resource than this.

3.0 out of 5 stars Paid by the word?, April 18, 2000

By 

Carey A. Holzman (Glendale, AZ USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Windows® 98 Registry (Paperback)

This book, while comprehensive, is not written for your average user. As a PC technician for over 10 years, this book had me reading paragraphs two or three times in order to understand what Mr. Woram is trying to communicate. The book is written as you would expect a government manual on rules and regulations to be written. Example: "So whenever bad things happen and the Registry is a prime suspect, you should start searching for evidence in Chapter 7. However, if a problem is polite enough to announce itself by displaying a message, then try Chapter 8, where such messages are lined up for inspection. Some messages are self-explanatory, while others border on the incomprehensible. If you encounter one of the latter, perhaps the explanation offered in this book will help. And if neither the message nor the explanation is enough to resolve the problem, then you'll find a reference to a section in the previous chapter, or to an earlier part of the book, where the required information can be found." HUH?? He also details a way of backing up the two main HKEYs in DOS. What he fails to mention, however, is that those files have attributes that you must reset before you can run his example commands. OH, and if your registry is very large, this exporting can take upwards of an hour or more. And when doing the restore in DOS, he fails to mention that a large registry may result in an Out Of Memory error, since DOS has such limited memory capacity. He tends to be a bit wordy, with things like: "The title bar at the top of the window contains the conventional Windows components: a Control menu icon, the title of the application, and the usual three buttons for minimize, restore, and close. No further explanation is offered here." So while he feels the need to tell us that a registry error may 'annouce itself', he feels the need to tell us that it does this by 'displaying a message', (see above), and then he says, in the other example that "no other information is offered here." Well, one could deduce that fact on ones own, without that frivolous information. He writes parts of the book as if the reader has never used Windows before, and then writes other parts of the book using Hexidecimal codes without an explanation of how to interpret them. Example: "Just add 10 to the hexidecimal..." If you see 5E, how do you add 10 to that? This would require previous knowledge of hexidecimal since no explanation is offered in this book. Definately not a cover-to-cover read. An excellent reference for a technician or power user. Not for your average Joe.