Stupid Question 114: What is the “Windows Registry”?
Just a day after my joke on twitter about having to serve as IT support since I am a programmer and family can’t really tell the different areas apart (“Well, you work in IT – right??”) family called for some IT support.
Luckily for all of us this time I was indeed able to help. After convincing my father in law to get Windows 8 I (or should I say we- as my husband was also involved) felt obliged to provide help. He had an old notebook, a tiny little Samsung thing, about three years old and it ran XP before. YES! XP! I know! It was an outrage. Thing is, once he installed Windows 8, the resolution was to low to run any apps in the Metro mode. To get this working it required a tiny bit hack in the Windows Registry. But what is that?
Windows Registry Metro Apps
It’s a collection of databases, the program itself (the registry Editor) allows you to see all the keys and values that make up this registry. All those keys and values are configuration settings in the operating system. It was introduced with Windows 95 – and is hated by many, and loved by a few.
To bring up the tool, use the command line tool and type regedit and hit enter.
I would recommend that you are careful when playing around with the key and values, and may I also suggest that you make a backup!
Under :
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\Extensions\ContractId\Windows.Launch\PackageId
You can find all the Windows Store Apps installed, here in the image you can see the step by step guide App I created called Mihsp, and the keys and values that can be edited. REG_SZ actually means it is a string. Yeah, go figue…
To let an older laptop that ash to low resolution ‘fake’ a better resolution so the apps will run ( Windows 8 apps are made for a resolution of 1024 x 728 and up) press Ctrl + F and search for Display1_DownScalingSupported , and change all the values from 0 to 1.
Comments
Last modified on 2012-12-28