Windows 2000 Registry Little Black Book: The Definitive Resource on the NT Registry

A cookbook of hacks you can make to the Registries of the various Windows 2000 operating systems, Windows 2000 Registry Little Black Book will help Windows 2000 administrators make their machines behave the way they want. It'll also help them get a better understanding of how Windows 2000 works, and more than likely introduce them to capabilities of the operating system that aren't well publicized in standard documentation.

Like all books in the Black Book series, the chapters in Windows 2000 Registry Little Black Book (each of which has to do with a functional area, like TCP/IP networking or the graphical user interface) are divided into "In Brief" and "Immediate Solutions" sections. "In Brief" is meant to explain the concepts that underlie the recipes and procedures that appear in the "Immediate Solutions" section, but for this subject the section seems to have been included as a formality--it's miniscule in most chapters and serves only to introduce some terms (terms you should be familiar with if you're considering hacking the Registry). "Immediate Solutions" sections are good, though wordy: every last Registry change is documented with a procedure that begins, "Launch Regedt32." This book could be a third of its present size if this padding were cut. --David Wall

Topics covered: How to change the values of Windows 2000 Registry keys to bring about particular behaviors, such as changing authentication timeouts and changing the way Windows reacts to a service's failure to start; Registry hacks for networking; the graphical user interface; multimedia; hardware; and Internet Information Server (IIS).