Any good tutorials on how windows operates?

[irishScott]

I've just seen (and used) a lot of good tweak guides out there (registry tweaks and whatnot). I was just wondering: How the hell do you people figure this stuff out? Knowing that changing a single registry key buried behind about 10 layers of folders isn't exactly gained from everyday experience. Just curious.

 

[Nothinman]

A lot of different places, MS documents a handful of their keys in their knowledge base and some of them are obvious as to what they do.

The main problem is that a lot of people, especially those writing tweak guides, don't actually understand what they're changing. The DisablePagingExecutive key is a great example, first off if you ask most people what the NT executive is they'll just look at you funny. If they do happen to know, or guess correctly, they'll still most likely just think "paging == bad" and if you can disable it that's obviously a good thing, right? Actually that key's also a good example of something that's so trivial that I can't even imagine why MS would make it tunable. The effects are almost certainly 0 and on the off chance that they're not 0 they'll still be so small as to fall into the statistical noise and be useless.

Anyway, sorry about the tangent. If you want to really learn how Windows works get a copy of Inside Windows. I don't know how much of the registry tweaks it'll cover, but it'll definitely be a more informative read than any XP tweak guide on someone's geocities page.

 

[legacyNW]

+1 on Inside Windows. (Used to be Inside NT). Might be more than you are looking for but you'll leran a lot. Next time someone comes blabbing to you about linux this or apple that you can make an informed opinion.

Second, search the knowledge base (KB) at Msoft. For example, check out the MS Powertoys website, read the notes, search for the ptoys in KB and see if they are discussed.