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 , and this does work, assuming you have the ...

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(...

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 until you drop. (This ...

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...