In Windows 3.x applications, a wide variety of application-specific and user-specific information was commonly stored in .INI files. While .INI files may still be used, the system and user registry files are the preferred methods.
Although Windows 3.x did support a registry and registry access APIs, this original registry contained only one unnamed value per registry key, always in a string format. In contrast, the Windows 98/95/NT registry keys may contain multiple, named values and these values may consist of many different types of data.
NOTE
See Chapter 17 for more information about using the registry.