The Old New Thing

October 2008 - Page 3 of 4 - The Old New Thing

Disable your wireless network card to speed up VPN’ing

October 15, 2008 Oct 15, 2008 10/15/08
Raymond Chen
As a follow-up to my tip on speeding up connecting via RAS and a SmartCard, I've been told that another trick you can do is to disable your wireless networking card before initiating the VPN connection. Wireless networking cards are a huge attack surface, and the VPN software spends a lot of time trying to secure it. I don't have a wireless...

Why does Task Manager let me kill critical system processes?

October 14, 2008 Oct 14, 2008 10/14/08
Raymond Chen
Because you told it to. If you run Task Manager, highlight a critical system process like Winlogon, click End Task, and confirm, then gosh darn it, you just killed Winlogon, and the system will reboot. (Assuming, of course, that you have sufficient privileges to terminate Winlogon in the first place.) Task Manager in earlier versions of ...

Why does killing Winlogon take down the entire system?

October 13, 2008 Oct 13, 2008 10/13/08
Raymond Chen
Commenter Demeli asks, "Why does Winlogon take down the entire system when you attach a debugger to it? (drwtsn32 -p <pid of Winlogon>)" This question already has a mistaken in it. Running drwtsn32 on a process isn't attaching a debugger to it. Attaching a debugger would be something like ntsd -p <pid of Winlogon>, and this does...

How do I suppress the CapsLock warning on password edit controls?

October 10, 2008 Oct 10, 2008 10/10/08
Raymond Chen
One of the features added to version 6 of the shell common controls is a warning balloon that appears if CapsLock is on in a password control. Let's demonstrate. Take the scratch program, add a manifest that requests version 6 of the common controls (perhaps by using a Visual C++ extension), and add the following: BOOL OnCreate(...
Comments are closed.0 0
Code

How can I increase the number of files I can open at a time?

October 9, 2008 Oct 9, 2008 10/9/08
Raymond Chen
People who ask this question invariably under-specify the question. They just say, "How can I increase the number of files I can open at a time?" without saying how they're opening them. From the operating system's point of view, the number of files you can open at a time is limited only by available resources. Call CreateFile until you drop...
Comments are closed.0 0
Code

Why does the Disk Management snap-in report my volume as Healthy when the drive is dying?

October 8, 2008 Oct 8, 2008 10/8/08
Raymond Chen
Windows Vista displays a big scary dialog when the hard drive's on-board circuitry reports that the hardware is starting to fail. Yet if you go to the Disk Management snap-in, it reports that the drive is Healthy. What's up with that? The Disk Management snap-in is interested in the logical structure of the drive. Is the partition table ...

Microspeak: Teaming

October 7, 2008 Oct 7, 2008 10/7/08
Raymond Chen
At training sessions, you don't participate in team-building exercises. No, that's old-fashioned terminology, the sort of thing those old stodgy Web 1.0 dinosaurs would say. The new word is teaming. Note: This Microspeak entry was submitted by a colleague from the UK, so it may be peculiar to the UK dialect of Microspeak. Pre-emptive...

Eventually, nothing is special any more

October 6, 2008 Oct 6, 2008 10/6/08
Raymond Chen
Commenter ulric suggested that two functions for obtaining the "current" window should exist, one for normal everyday use and one for "special use" when you want to interact with windows outside your process. I'd be more at ease however if the default behaviour of the API was to return HWND for the current process only, and the apps that ...

Stories of crossing into Canada: The wedding

October 3, 2008 Oct 3, 2008 10/3/08
Raymond Chen
When I cross the border into Canada, there's almost always a story. Rarely is there an uneventful crossing. In 2007, I attended a wedding in Vancouver, BC, and here's how the conversation went at the border crossing into Canada: Me: Good morning. (As I hand over passports and green cards for everybody in the car.) Border guard: Hello...

Acquire and release sound like bass fishing terms, but they also apply to memory models

October 3, 2008 Oct 3, 2008 10/3/08
Raymond Chen
Many of the normal interlocked operations come with variants called InterlockedXxxAcquire and InterlockedXxxRelease. What do the terms Acquire and Release mean here? They have to do with the memory model and how aggressively the CPU can reorder operations around it. An operation with acquire semantics is one which does not permit ...
Comments are closed.0 0
Code