Even after a decade as a Windows power user, touching the registry is absolutely a last resort option; the number of side effects, unintended consequences, and

Even after a decade as a Windows power user, touching the registry is absolutely a last resort option; the number of side effects, unintended consequences, and chances of registry corruption are crazy. There's no solid documentation! I'd rather (and have) make changes to the kernel on my Linux box, edit drivers, mess with the boot sequence. You can read about what each thing does, make backups, and like you said, just restore a previous state. So much more straightforward than messing with vague hex values...