Registry hacks are one way to customize your windows registry to increase performance and usability. On that note I'd like to offer a word of caution. "Before altering registry settings, be certain that you have a good backup of your registry" All modifications should be done with extreme care. Any random or unintended changes that you make can have severe consequences. Be warned!

How do you edit the registry? The easiest way to edit the registry is to run the regedit utility from Start > Run > regedit. By the way at this point you can also make a copy of the registry before you edit it. To save the registry click on File > Export > Select a location where you want to place the saved file > Enter a name in the "File Name" field and click on Save.

Regedit is a built in utility that displays the entire contents of the windows registry. There are also third party tools that can be used to edit simple functions and increase performance, like TweakUI, a free Microsoft tool that helps you customize desktop settings and functionality and is rather safe to use. The registry hacks we'll go over on this article will require you to do some manual editing however.

Speed up your Start Menu

By default the start menu opens at a moderate speed, which is 400 milliseconds. If this is too slow for you, open up regedit and navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Control Panel/Desktop and find the MenuShowDelay entry on the right side, double click it to open and change the value to something lower than 400, adjust as you see fit. You can also make the menu slower by increasing this value.

Find every type of file

One of the most useful registry hacks. When you do a search on a windows PC, by default windows will ignore files with extensions that it does not recognize. By editing the windows registry you can easily take care of this annoying default setting so you can see all files when you search. To do this open the Registry Editor (regedit), and then navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\ContentIndex. Double-click the FilterFilesWithUnknownExtensions icon in the right pane, change the 0 in the 'Value data' box to 1, press Enter.

Stop auto reboots after system updates

This one is priceless, I've never heard of anyone who actually enjoys the reboot part of an update. In the registry editor navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate\AU and find the value named NoAutoRebootWithLoggedOnUsers and change its value to 1. This is a REG_DWORD type and if does not exist you can create it and add the correct value.

Disable the "Open With" prompt

Always one of my favorite registry hacks for another greatly annoying feature of windows when you attempt to open unknown files. Skip the open with prompt and go directly to the list of programs. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System and create a DWORD value called "NoInternetOpenWith" if it does not already exist and set its value to 1. This hack can also be applied at the user level, by creating a DWORD entry called InternetOpenWith at this location: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer.

Load applications faster

Both windows XP and Vista have pre-fetch programs that pre-load programs into a cache area, the default setting for this is 3, but you can experiment with the speed of load by changing this value from 3 to 5 and up to 9. Navigate to HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\SessionManager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters and find EnablePrefetchingSetting to edit the value.