Installing programs, or tweaking your system, causes changes to your windows registry. It’s good practice to backup your registry before making changes you think might mess up your Operating System. The backup process is very simple. Click the windows button, or start button, in the bottom left hand corner of your screen, then click run.

Type regedit, or regedit.exe, and click okay.

This loads the registry editor program window. Although you can backup individual registry keys, in this tutorial we will backup the entire registry. Select the root, or top most part of the registry tree, in this case it is Computer.

Next click File –> Export.

Save the file in a directory or folder, and with a filename, which will be easy to find if you need it. You can even save it to a thumb drive, floppy, or on your hard drive.

The registry backup is a snapshot of all the setting on your computer at the time you saved it. You might want to make this backup right before installing a risky program, so that you can restore the registry if things get messed up. You wouldn’t want to restore the registry a few days later, for instance, after you’ve made changes to your system you want to keep. The backup should be made most often just before something risky, where you might need to restore the registry right after your mistake.

To restore the registry simply follow the same steps except choose Import, select your backed up registry file, then open.

Windows Vista users should use System Restore instead, which fixes more than just the registry. Click here to find out how to use System Restore.