The Old New Thing

September 2011 - Page 3 of 3 - The Old New Thing

Why doesn't the Disk Management snap-in incorporate S.M.A.R.T. data?

September 8, 2011 Sep 8, 2011 09/8/11
Raymond Chen
My article a while back on Why the Disk Management snap-in reports my volume as Healthy when the drive is dying gave the low-level explanation of why the Disk Management snap-in does not incorporate SMART information: because the Disk Management snap-in is concerned with volume partitioning. DWalker59 noted that the use of the word "Healthy...

Why is the registry a hierarchical database instead of a relational one?

September 7, 2011 Sep 7, 2011 09/7/11
Raymond Chen
Commenter ton asks why the registry was defined as a hierarchical database instead of a relational database. Heck, it's not even a hierarchical database! The original registry was just a dictionary; i.e., a list of name/value pairs, accessed by name. In other words, it was a flat database. If you turned your head sideways and treated ...

Thanks for letting me know what my ideal career and company are

September 5, 2011 Sep 5, 2011 09/5/11
Raymond Chen
When it's performance review season, all of a sudden you start getting mail about career management. What a coincidence. There are a variety of career management tools available, some mandatory, some optional. I gave one of the optional ones a shot, since it claimed to help me "manage my career and professional development", and as I already ...

Invoking commands on items in the Recycle Bin

September 1, 2011 Sep 1, 2011 09/1/11
Raymond Chen
Once you've found the items you want in the Recycle Bin, you may want to perform some operation on them. This brings us back to our old friend, . At this point, you're just snapping two blocks together. You have one block called Retrieving properties from items in the Recycle Bin and you have another block called Invoking verbs on items. ...