October 2003

Why does the System Properties page round the memory size?

Raymond Chen October 6, 2003 Oct 6, 2003 10/6/03

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 ...

Why can't I use &-accelerators on the Start menu?

Raymond Chen October 3, 2003 Oct 3, 2003 10/3/03

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" ...

What do the text label colors mean for files?

Raymond Chen October 2, 2003 Oct 2, 2003 10/2/03

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 ...

Why does my Advanced Options dialog say ON and OFF after every option?

Raymond Chen October 2, 2003 Oct 2, 2003 10/2/03

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...

Jag skrivar svenska inte so bra.

Raymond Chen October 1, 2003 Oct 1, 2003 10/1/03

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 ...

Jag taler lita svenska.

Raymond Chen October 1, 2003 Oct 1, 2003 10/1/03

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 ...

Why do I get spurious WM_MOUSEMOVE messages?

Raymond Chen October 1, 2003 Oct 1, 2003 10/1/03

In order to understand this properly, it helps to know where WM_MOUSEMOVE 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...

The Old New Thing

October 2003 - Page 4 of 4 - The Old New Thing

Why does the System Properties page round the memory size?

Why can't I use &-accelerators on the Start menu?

What do the text label colors mean for files?

Why does my Advanced Options dialog say ON and OFF after every option?

Jag skrivar svenska inte so bra.

Jag taler lita svenska.

Why do I get spurious WM_MOUSEMOVE messages?

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