The Old New Thing

November 2003 - The Old New Thing

Hello Sweden, you're on fire

November 28, 2003 Nov 28, 2003 11/28/03
Raymond Chen
(Geek talk resumes on Monday.) The longstanding tradition of Norwegians telling Swedish jokes and vice versa, was recently refueled by a border story. A Norwegian man called Sweden on his mobile phone to tell them they had a forest fire. Not only did the firefighters not know about the blaze, they didn't recognize the name of the place on ...

It's like the Swedes don't want you to learn their language

November 27, 2003 Nov 27, 2003 11/27/03
Raymond Chen
(It's a holiday in the States today and tomorrow, so I'm not going to talk about geek stuff. That'll resume on Monday.) If you pay a visit to Deutsche Welle, the German international broadcasting service, you will find a wide array of online German learning materials, such as the daily news in slowly- and clearly-enunciated German (...

Other tricks with WM_GETDLGCODE

November 26, 2003 Nov 26, 2003 11/26/03
Raymond Chen
The WM_GETDLCODE message lets you influence the behavior of the dialog manager. A previous entry on using WM_GETDLGCODE described the flag which controls whether edit control content is auto-selected when focus changes. I was going to write a bit about the other flags, but it turns out that Knowledge Base Article 83302 already covers this...

A shortcut to the Run dialog

November 24, 2003 Nov 24, 2003 11/24/03
Raymond Chen
Here's a little script that opens the Run dialog. You can save it as "Run.js" and double-click it. The advantage of this approach over various others people have come up with is that this one is actually documented. (And therefore is less likely to break in the next version of the operating system...

Why isn't Fast User Switching enabled on domains?

November 21, 2003 Nov 21, 2003 11/21/03
Raymond Chen
Windows XP added a new feature called Fast User Switching which lets you switch between users without having to log off. But this feature is disabled if your computer is joined to a domain. Why? There were several reasons, none of them individually insurmountable, but they added up to quite a lot of work for something IT administrators weren...

What's the deal with the System Volume Information folder?

November 20, 2003 Nov 20, 2003 11/20/03
Raymond Chen
In the root of every drive is a folder called "System Volume Information". If your drive is NTFS, the permissions on the folder are set so not even administrators can get in there. What's the big secret? The folder contains information that casual interference could cause problems with proper system functioning. Here are some of the things...

How can I tell if I have the 64-bit edition of Windows?

November 19, 2003 Nov 19, 2003 11/19/03
Raymond Chen
Answer: Your wallet is empty. Seriously, there is no way you bought an Itanium by mistake. They are expensive machines: The entry-level workstation available from HP (who co-developed the Itanium with Intel) goes for over $3000 and the entry-level server is over $13,000. And in addition to paying for the computer itself, you probably had to ...