Showing archive results for 2003

The command prompt is a drop target: Dropping a file onto it inserts the filename.

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't ev...

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 kept...

If you want to use the "Go To" or "Status Bar" options, you have to turn off word warp first. (Word wrap messes with line breaks.)

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 instal...

When your program displays a dialog box with buttons, please make the buttons match the text. Consider this dialog, which appears after you install patches from Windows Update: It asks a yes/no question, but the options are "OK" and "Cancel". Either the buttons should be c...

The world: a primer Great Britain Small American dependency located approximately 5,000 miles outside Galveston, Texas.

My favorite bad CD-ROM drive from Windows 95 was one where the manufacturer cut a corner to save probably twenty-five cents. The specification for CD-ROM controllers indicates that each can host up to four CD-ROM drives. When you talk to the card, you specify which drive you wish to communicate with. The manufacturer of a certain brand of contr...

Flavenoids in Guinness combat fatty deposits in arteries. Note, however that the beer was consumed by being "fed ... via tubes directly into their stomachs." On the other hand, a friend of mine points out, "I thought a tube leading directly to the stomach was also called the esophagus. That's my Guinness ...

By default, when the user TABs to an edit control in a dialog box, the entire contents of the edit control are autoselected. This occurs because the edit control responds with the flag in response to the message. To prevent it from happening, remove that flag. All this subclass procedure does is remove the flag from the return value of the ...