Best way to learn how to edit registry?

[KevB]

I'm not an IT person, although I am a wannabe geek. I work with computers all day/every day - but not from a programming perspective. It seems that to really tweak my Touch, I need to learn how to make registry changes. However, I also don't want to brick my phone because of my stupidity. Is there a place to learn the ins and outs of registry editing?

[avhokie]

It's a pretty simple concept. The registry is like a bunch of folders (the directory structure) and files (the keys that contain data). By using a registry editor (like PHM), you can see and modify them. The keys (files) are defined to contain a specific type of information. The two that you will most commonly see are "String" and "DWORD".

A String can hold pretty much any readable text. So if some program stores a URL in the registry, it will probably be stored as a String. So as an example, in the registry you may see a key called "URL1", defined as type String, and containing value "http://www.ppcgeeks.com"

A DWORD stores a number. Some of the numbers you see that people tell you to modify could tell the system how much memory to use for something (like 8192 kbytes). Other times, you see a key with a value of 0 or 1, representing FALSE and TRUE. So for example, when you set SMSNoSentMsg to 1 (TRUE), you're saying that it's true that you do not want the SMS Sent Message.

And remember to back up your registry before you make any major changes so that you can restore it.