The Old New Thing

January 2012 - The Old New Thing

The Freudian typo that will not die: Enchanced video quality

January 31, 2012 Jan 31, 2012 01/31/12
Raymond Chen
While wasting time doing valuable background research on my computer, I received the following suggestion: For enchanced video quality, click here. It's good to know that the typo that I first encountered in 1993 is still alive and kicking. (And even though it's not important to the story, people will demand some sort of follow-up, so ...

Why does it take Task Manager longer to appear when you start it from the Ctrl+Alt+Del dialog?

January 30, 2012 Jan 30, 2012 01/30/12
Raymond Chen
Amit was curious why it takes longer for Task Manager to appear when you start it from the Ctrl+Alt+Del dialog compared to launching it from the taskbar. Well, you can see the reason right there on the screen: You're launching it the long way around. If you launch Task Manager from the taskbar, Explorer just launches taskmgr.exe via the ...

Does mapping the same shared memory two times in a process lead to double the address space usage?

January 27, 2012 Jan 27, 2012 01/27/12
Raymond Chen
A customer designed a system which uses shared memory. Specifically, for each database file, they create a corresponding shared memory block of, say, 200MB. Multiple clients which connect to the same database file use the same shared memory block. Naturally, if two processes each access the same database file, each process will map the shared ...
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Why doesn't the Windows 7 Start menu have a pushpin for pinning items?

January 26, 2012 Jan 26, 2012 01/26/12
Raymond Chen
You may have noticed a minor inconsistency between pinning a program to the Start menu and pinning a destination to a program's Jump List. Although pinned items appear at the top of the respective lists, and both the Start menu and Jump List let you right-click an item and select Pin/Unpin, the Jump List also lets you pin and unpin an item by ...

How do I disable the fault-tolerant heap?

January 25, 2012 Jan 25, 2012 01/25/12
Raymond Chen
A while back, I linked to a talk by Silviu Calinoiu on the fault-tolerant heap. But what if you don't want the fault-tolerant heap? For example, during program development, you probably want to disable the fault-tolerant heap for your program: If the program is crashing, then it should crash so you can debug it! Method 1 is to disable...
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A single-handed effort to keep the memory of $2 bills alive

January 24, 2012 Jan 24, 2012 01/24/12
Raymond Chen
As I noted when I told the story of the computer programmer who dabbled in making change that my colleague had a lot of money-related quirks. For some reason my colleague felt the $2 bill deserved more attention. Every so often, he would go to the bank and buy $100 in $2 bills, then reintroduce the bills into circulation and enjoy people's ...

Can OANOCACHE be used for non-debug purposes?

January 23, 2012 Jan 23, 2012 01/23/12
Raymond Chen
Friday asks whether OANOCACHE can be used for non-debug purposes, say to improve stability and/or speed. You can try, but it's not recommended. For one thing, it probably damages stability, because there are many applications out there which unwittingly rely on the BSTR cache to protect them from heap corruption bugs. The Windows team has ...
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Why do Microsoft customer records use the abbreviation "cx" for customer?

January 19, 2012 Jan 19, 2012 01/19/12
Raymond Chen
As is common in many industries, Microsoft customer service records employ abbreviations for many commonly-used words. In the travel industry, for example, pax is used as an abbreviation for passenger. The term appears to have spread to the hotel industry, even though people who stay at a hotel aren't technically passengers. (Well, unless you...