Windows Vista in a Nutshell

Five Cool Things You Can Do in Your Registry

Armed with your new understanding of the Windows Vista Registry, you’re no doubt ready to get in there and start exploring. Hopefully, this chapter has provided the “lay of the land” you need to get and keep your bearings in the otherwise confusing wilderness of the Registry. Although I don’t have the kind of room in this book that it takes to make you an expert, I would like to send you on your way by pointing out some interesting landmarks—in other words, five cool changes you can make in your own Registry. (For more Registry hacks, see my upcoming book, Windows Vista Hacks, from O’Reilly.)

Open a Command Prompt from the Right-Click Menu

The command prompt is useful for a variety of down-and-dirty tasks, such as mass-deleting or renaming files. But if you find yourself frequently switching back and forth between Windows Explorer and the command prompt, there’s help—you can easily open a command prompt using the right-click menu.

For example, let’s say you want to open the command prompt at the folder that’s your current location. Normally, that takes two steps: first open a command prompt, and then navigate to your current folder. However, there’s a quicker way: add an option to the right-click context menu that will open a command prompt at your current folder. For example, if you were to right-click on the C:\My Stuff folder, you could then choose to open a command prompt at C:\My Stuff.

In the Registry Editor, go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Classes/Folder/Shell ...