Professional Windows® PowerShell

20.3. Changing the Registry

The first thing to say about changing anything in the registry is that you need to be sure that you know what you're doing. The registry is enormous, so becoming familiar with the meaning of registry keys and values takes a significant amount of time. If you don't understand the effect of a change you make in the registry, you are risking creating a machine that won't run correctly or at all. Please take note of the advice I gave you earlier in the chapter about making a registry backup before tinkering in the registry.

The following example changes the default behavior of Notepad on my machine from opening with no status bar to opening with a status bar. In Figure 20-2, the value for the StatusBar key is 0, meaning that Notepad opens with no status bar. The following command displays the same information:

get-itemproperty HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\Notepad -Name StatusBar

To set the value of StatusBar to 1, use the following command:

set-itemproperty HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\Notepad -Name StatusBar -Value 1

To confirm that the change has been made to the StatusBar property, run this command again:

get-itemproperty HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\Notepad -Name StatusBar

Launch Notepad and observe that a status bar is now displayed.

To set the value of StatusBar back to 0, use the following command:

set-itemproperty HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\Notepad -Property StatusBar -Value 0

You can see in Figure 20-7 the execution of the preceding commands. Launch Notepad ...