Tip of the day: Bookmark your favorite Registry locations

If you expect to be a Windows power user, you must muck about in the registry. (Mere mortals, of course, should avoid the Registry Editor like the plague. Seriously. One slip in the Registry Editor and you can render your system unbootable or worse.)

For experienced Windows users, part of the annoyance of using the Registry Editor is having to expand each branch to find the exact key and value you’re looking for. It’s especially tedious when you keep coming back to the same key while you experiment with a new setting or troubleshoot a problem.

The solution is to use a well-hidden Regedit feature that lets you bookmark a particular location. After highlighting a key in the tree pane on the left side of the Regedit window, click Favorites, Add to Favorites. Change the default name to a descriptive label and click OK. Your saved entries appear on the Regedit Favorites menu, sorted in the order in which you created them. To remove a favorite, click Favorites, Remove Favorite(s). Click one or more entries in the list (hold down the Ctrl key as you click to select multiple items) and click OK to remove those items.