If You Want to Tinker, Be a Thinker - Or You'll Turn Your Puter into a Clinker by Mike SmithWe recently received a request for help at Puter Tutor Message Board, and realized that answer to question was one that every computer user could benefit from. At very least, understanding answer could save a LOT of unnecessary grief!
The question is below, but details of all registry editing have been left out for 2 reasons:
1) I do not encourage playing around in registry if you are not experienced and do not know what you are doing.
2) The actual details of what was edited are not important to answers and most folks wouldn't understand them anyway. (If you want to see details you can go to Puter Tutor Community Message Board and read post.http://pub57.ezboard.com/bputercentral )
So, are you ready? The information below is absolutely critical to avoiding computer disasters!!
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Question:
Hi, I'm Sara and I was trying to get rid of a sub7 virus but messed up things so I can't get into any of my applications. Here's what I did....
1.Click on Start>Run, type Regedit then hit Enter key.
Yada-yada-yada.
Now I can't get my freemem, zone alarm pro, or any of Windows stuff to work. I have Windows ME and when I try to get back into regedit.exe to fix it I get an "the path to this application does not exist" pop-up. Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.
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Hi Sara,
First off, bad news. It looks like you are going to either have to reinstall your OS or go to Safe Mode and see if you can to a previous Restore Pint. You are saving Restore Points, aren't you?
You might try going into "regedit" from Safe Mode but if registry itself is damaged, you are stuck. One of most difficult things to get across to folks is that stupid tech people that write all these fixes think they are dealing with someone that knows what they do. The seem to think that there are no Newbies or inexperienced people on Internet.
The following Rules should precede any instructions that tell you how to do something in "regedit" or before doing anything that will change your Operating System.
RULE SET 1
1. Do NOT go into Registry unless you know exactly what you are doing. This can leave your Puter inoperable!
2. Before you start playing in Registry, make a backup to a disk or another drive on your Puter so you can restore it if you make a mistake!