Showing results for October 2003 - Page 4 of 4 - The Old New Thing

Oct 6, 2003
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Why does the System Properties page round the memory size?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

During Windows 95 beta testing, people ran the System Properties page and complained about "missing memory". The Windows 95 System Properties page reports the amount of memory available to Windows as system memory, which is not necessarily the same as the amount of memory installed in your co...

History
Oct 3, 2003
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Why can't I use &-accelerators on the Start menu?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

The first letter of the program is the accelerator and there's nothing you can do about it. So if you have ten programs by Microsoft, they all use the accelerator "M". (Yes I hate this too. The first thing I do after installing a Microsoft program is go into the Start menu and delete the word "Microsoft" from t...

History
Oct 2, 2003
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What do the text label colors mean for files?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Blue means compressed; green means encrypted. This is an example of one of those "come on, it's a tiny, simple feature" requests. Yes, the code to do this isn't particularly complicated, but it adds another element of "Ha ha, I'm going to do something in a way that you will never be able to figure ...

Tips/Support
Oct 2, 2003
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Why does my Advanced Options dialog say ON and OFF after every option?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Because Windows thinks a screenreader is running. If a screenreader is running, then the Advanced Options dialog will add "ON" and "OFF" to the end of each checkbox item so the screenreader program can read the state to a blind user.

Tips/Support
Oct 1, 2003
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Jag skrivar svenska inte so bra.

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

The nice thing about the schwa sound is that you don't have to spell it. Many thanks to C-J Berg for fixing my Swedish spelling errors. I probably introduced some new ones here, though. But why Swedish? Well, it wasn't Swedish initially. Many years ago, I saw an ad in th...

Non-Computer
Oct 1, 2003
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Jag taler lita svenska.

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Attended my first formal Swedish lesson last night. It's great to recapture the simultaneous thrill and frustration of trying to have a conversation in a language you don't really know. It's a small class - Swedish isn't exactly one of the "big-name" languages out there. I always feel sorry f...

Non-Computer
Oct 1, 2003
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Why do I get spurious WM_MOUSEMOVE messages?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

In order to understand this properly, it helps to know where messages come from. When the hardware mouse reports an interrupt, indicating that the physical mouse has moved, Windows determines which thread should receive the mouse move message and sets a flag on that thread's input queue that...

Code