When installing Windows 7, Windows Vista or Windows XP for the first time, you should have been prompted to enter an Owner Name and Organization / Company name. Normally there’s never a need to change these settings however what if you entered in a typo or, what if your not the original owner and you want to change this information?
For instance, if you open up pretty much any application that comes with Windows and Click Help, About. You will see the Registered Owner and Organization Name.
Again, although not a big deal, if your like me it’s the little things that drive me crazy 
So, unfortunately Windows 7, XP and Windows Vista doesn’t have an easy way to resolve this, however by following this How-To Tutorial, we can have you fixed up in just a few minutes.
Please note that before we start, the windows registry is very sensitive and you can easily make your computer inoperable if you don’t know what you are doing. That’s what this guide is here for!
1. To start, Click the Start Menu icon. Then Type in Regedit and Press Enter. The regedit program should appear above, Click Regedit to open it.
Note – Although the steps shown are for Windows 7 and Windows Vista, the process is the same for Windows XP. Just Click – Start, Run and type Regedit to open the Windows Registry Editor
2. The User Account Control will pop up, click Continue unless you have previous Disabled the Windows Vista UAC
3. Now that the registry is open, Navigate to to the following key location in the Tree Navigation Menu
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion
4. The two key entries to Modify are RegisteredOrganization and RegisterdOwner. To change them simply Double Click each entry to open the key editor and then Type your new name. To save changes click OK.
You can now close the Registry Editor if you are finished.
No reboot is required after your changes. Simply open Notepad or run WinVer.exe from the command line to verify the new Owner information has been set! GROOVY ehh??
Thank you!
I bought an HP laptop with windows installed and the cheeky buggers put hewlet packard as the organisation so that all my software was registered to them, all documents created copyrighted to them etc. Why MS does not make this changable via a simple wizard or setting is beyond me!
Hi Kelly! Yeah, I have no idea why MS didn’t make it a bit easier to configure this… I’m guessing it was a request from all the OEM hardware vendors.
Welcome to the site! Thanks for the comment.
I wrote a program to change Owner and organization registry entries so you don’t have to muck about in the registry. Works for Windows XP and VISTA. However with windows vista you must right click on the program and select ‘Run as Administrator’ or the program won’t have sufficient access to the registry.
http://www.datpdx.com/download.php?view.1
Let me know what you think. I am trying to make a bunch of free tools to do all the things MS left out of windows. In my opinion this should be somewhere in the control panel so you can change it when you want. I am also up for any other ideas anything that is a simple registry tweak I can write a simple app for.
- Tap3w0rm@gmail.com