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Understanding the windows registry - Making changes to another user - Part 1

Started by Andy, October 13, 2016, 12:05:29 AM

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Andy

So far, we have seen how you can change something in your own registry settings.

Now let's start to look at changing another user account's registry settings.

Every user has a registry "Hive" associated with it, in other words, that persons own preferred settings.

And every hive is stored as a single file called NTUSER.DAT

On my PC I have setup two user accounts (Anne and Andy).

So the paths to these two hives is as follows:

For Anne it's C:\Users\Anne\NTUSER.DAT
For Me it's    C:\Users\Andy\NTUSER.DAT

The path remains the same, it's only the user account name that changes.

With this in mind, I would like you to create a new user account on your computer - let's call it "Test". (you can always delete the account after testing).

You will have to log onto the Test account at least once so windows can finish off setting it up correctly.

We will use this Test account for testing rather than our own.

Now let's load the Test account into the registry manually using regedit.exe

1. Make sure you are logged out of the Test account and logged into your account.
2. Open regedit.exe
3. Click on the registry key HKEY_USERS
4. Select "File" then "Load Hive"
5. You will get a browse box up
6. Navigate to C:\Users\Test\NTUSER.DAT - and click Open
7. Enter a name for this key, let's call it Test, and click OK

You should now see a new key called Test under HKEY_USERS.

This means Test's registry settings are now loaded into the registry - with this done, you could then make changes to it - I will cover this in the next tutorial.

So after proving that we can load another user's Hive (registry settings), let's now finish off by unloading it.

1. Click once to highlight the Test registry key (HKEY_USERS\Test)
2. Click "File" then "Unload Hive" and click "Yes" to confirm.
3. Close regedit.exe

If you can't unload it - don't worry, it won't do any harm, and it won't be loaded after a restart of your computer.

I will post the next part soon as I have amended some code.

Please let me know you've created another user account called Test if you are interested in this tutorial so I can proceed with the next lesson, as by definition of what we are going to do, we need at least two user accounts.

Thanks,
Andy.
:)



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