I was alerted to an error message in Vista when I awoke this morning. Vista went through the routine of  trying to find a solution.

When I was a computer technician for a large corporation, I only ever asked 2 staff members out of a couple of thousand to alter stuff in the registry as most of them didn’t know what the registry was and there was a greater risk of them doing harm rather than fixing the problem. At Inspect My Gadget, I put disclaimers all over the place when I suggest a registry change including at the start of articles so people can back out before they begin.

Microsoft has given the disclaimer up the top, but what am I to do if I don’t know anything about computers ? Should I pay the shop I bought the computer from to do this for me ? I wonder if this error only comes up for users set as “Administrators”, and “Users” get a different set of instructions ? It doesn’t look that way.

I feel sorry for corporations rolling out thousands of copies if they would have to do this on each machine as they have disabled registry access to end users, or worse, the users have access and they attempt this and get it wrong. This looks like a message many computers will receive. I hope this is the last time I see a solution which includes altering the registry. Scary stuff.