Here's a lesson I learned very early on in my PC adventures—when it comes to the Windows registry, tread very carefully. While individual entries can be modified to do a number of useful things, change the wrong value and you can soon find yourself in a heap of trouble.
While that's still the case, it turns out Windows 10 seems to be a lot more resilient to mass registry edits than you might expect. YouTube channel has taken it to the extreme, modifying every entry to contain a zero value (via ). And while doing so breaks the vast majority of features, (.exe files no longer run, for example), Windows 10 will apparently still run, allow logins and logouts, and even allow a bit of messing around in Paint and WordPad.
Still, it's an interesting test of exactly what would happen if you committed the cardinal sin of running havoc through your registry entries. While the approach here isn't exactly scientific, it appears that Windows 10 is somewhat resistant to such tomfoolery. I'd have had a good bet on an instant crash, but hey, the more you know.
Now, just for giggles, let's see what happens when you set everything to a "1" value instead. My money's on something similar. However, as much as I'm down for a bit of home testing on my personal machine, I [[link]] think I'll leave this sort of thing to someone braver than I.
Is this the point where, despite the resilience shown here, I tell you unless you're prepared to break your machine?
OK, for sake of accuracy I'll add the proviso that following explicit instructions from trusted sources [[link]] is worth a try for . Regardless, it's often best to leave the mysteries of the registry to someone qualified if you don't know what you're doing, folks. Otherwise you might be stuck using nothing but Paint and WordPad forever, or at least, until Windows does its best to undo your poor decisions.