Using the Registry Editor in Windows Mobile

Using the Registry Editor in Windows Mobile
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Registry Editing for Beginners

The Windows Registry. Bask in its mystery and quirkiness. Simultaneously proving to be the source of and solution to all of your PC’s problems (as Homer would say). When Microsoft committed to bringing over the PC architecture to the mobile platform, they weren’t messing around - so they also brought over the registry architecture which is a bit outdated to say the least considering that phones today streamline all of these operations to work effortlessly behind-the-scenes - such as the iPhone and Droid with their integrated user interfaces.

There’s no built-in solution for registry editing on your WinMo phone like there is on Windows with the famous regedit command. Instead, you’ll have to rely on either painfully over-priced software ($30 anyone?) or free software that’s incredibly unwieldy. For the beginning registry editor, the free versions are more than enough. So what should you go with?

Using the PHM Editor

1. PHM Registry Editor, which you can find here, is a perfectly decent registry editing software application - go ahead and download it.

2. Install the PHM Registry Editor to your WinMo phone and open it up.

3. Inside the software you’ll see the traditional branching structure of the registry like the one inside your full PC.

4. BE VERY CAREFUL! Others will suggest performing a full backup before even running the software, but I’m assuming that since you’re on Brighthub and you looked this up, you probably either know what you’re doing or know enough to know that you can’t just mess around with random parts of the registry.

Tweaking the Registry

tweaks2k2v300

PHM is a complex piece of software for the user that has no idea what s/he is doing. Smaller tweaking programs like Tweaks2K2 is a much better program for those that want a little bit of freedom to simply play around with some rudimentary options for the registry. You can get the kinds of functionality you’d ordinarily get out of a TuneUp kind of software from these registry tweakers - improving your phone marginally depending on how deep you want to go to fix the registry.

But some users out there are more of the hands-on types, so you can also use the PHM editor to go in and manually fix whatever it is about the registry that’s bugging you. Search for values, search for subunits of folders, etc. It’s all integrated into the context menus of the PHM editor and inside the more advanced menus along the bottom of the software as well. However, I would only advise this if you know EXACTLY what value or what key it is you’re looking for. Delete the wrong key and, while you might not “brick” your phone, you could definitely lose functionality on your device.