Sick machine, don't know what to do

[Unknown]

Like I said just a different name.

Look up Unix, there's no registry in there. Macintosh OS X and Linux are
both types of Unixes. You are right that every operating system needs
something to maintain configuration info. In Unix, global configuration
info is kept in the "/etc" directory, and they are kept in the form of
editable text files. User-based configuration info is kept in each user's
home directory. And Application-based configuration info is kept in the
applications' base directories. Everything is kept localized, there's no
all-encompassing global registry for everything, from the OS, to the
users, to the applications. Makes it easier to fix problems and also makes
it easier to migrate applications from one machine to another.

Yousuf Khan

 

[Yousuf Khan]

Like I said just a different name.

But the point is not whether all operating systems have something like a
registry to keep configuration data, it is the method that they use to
keep this configuration data. Keeping it all in one monolithic structure
like Windows does, just makes it unnecessarily complicated, and requires
too much coordination between applications. That's why you end up with
situations like old registry entries remain behind even after
uninstallation, or an inability to simply copy applications over from
one machine to another. The way Windows 3.x used to do it before, with
*.ini files was much much better, easier to maintain.

Yousuf Khan