Showing archive results for 2011

We saw last time that the unattend file lets you change some Windows configuration settings that cannot be changed after Setup is complete. But one of the things you can't change is the location of the Program Files directory. Many people wish they could relocate their Program Files directory to another drive in order to relieve disk space pressur...

Some Windows settings can only be established as part of the installation process. This is done with a so-called unattend file. (Remember, no matter where you put an advanced setting, somebody will tell you that you are an idiot.) In earlier versions of Windows, the unattend file took the form of an INI file, but Windows Vista hopped aboard t...

In my 2011 mid-year link clearance, I linked to the story And that's why you should learn to pick your battles. I thought that was the end of the story, but no, it's the gift that keeps on giving. Beyoncé, the giant metal chicken has a Facebook page, populated with all sorts of crazy things like pictures of Beyoncé's relatives spo...

Commenter Bernard remarked that he moved from one side of the company campus to the other, and his commute distance (and time) was cut in half. That reminds me of a short story from a now-retired colleague of mine. He bicycled to work, and over the years, the gradual expansion of the Microsoft main corporate campus resulted in nearly three quarte...

We saw some time ago that the number one cause of crashes in Explorer is malware. It so happens that the number one cause of hangs in Explorer is disk access from context menu handlers (a special case of the more general principle, you can't open the file until the user tells you to open it). That's why I was amused by Memet's claim that "w...

It's that time again: Linking to other Microsoft bloggers.

Occasionally, a customer will ask for assistance explaining some strange heap behavior, or at least heap behavior that appears to be strange if you assume that the heap behaves purely classically. I need to understand the heap behavior we're seeing. I have a sample program which allocates five blocks of memory from the process heap, each of size ...

A customer requested a clarification on the MSDN documentation for the function. The MSDN documentation says that if the parameter is , then the behavior is undefined. Is this true? As explicitly stated in MSDN, the behavior is undefined. Observe that the annotation on the parameter is , which means that the parameter must be a non- value...

Impersonation requires end-to-end support.

The Windows group has its own domain (known as for historical reasons) which operates separately from the domain forest operated by the Microsoft IT department. Various trust relationships need to be set up between them so that people on the Windows team can connect to resources managed by the Microsoft IT department and vice versa, but it g...