I often use Group Policy to customize PC and server settings. However, sometimes I need more control, so I manually make registry changes. The problem with the manual approach is that between new installations, I often forget how to accomplish the registry changes.
Like most administrators, I'm cautious about making registry changes, so I decided to come up with a way to store registry-modification information and perform the modifications with minimal risk. My first crude solution was to maintain a folder in which I kept a number of common .reg files. Whenever I made a new registry change that I thought I might need later, I added a new .reg file to the folder. In many cases, the .reg files came in pairs, with one file to enable a setting and another file to disable the same setting. With so many files, I had a hard time keeping them organized, which made finding a particular .reg file difficult.
After examining my usage patterns with the .reg files, I discovered there were only about 20 or 30 files that I used regularly. I realized that the optimal solution would be to integrate the information in those files into a menu-driven script. That way, I could easily find and select the registry modification I needed. And by putting that menu-driven script on a shared folder and connecting to that share, I could make the changes to whatever computer I was logged on to. . . .
