The Old New Thing

May 2012 - Page 3 of 3 - The Old New Thing

Why are the Windows 7 system notification icons colorless?

May 7, 2012 May 7, 2012 05/7/12
Raymond Chen
Mike wondered why the system notification icons went colorless in Windows 7 and why they went back to regular tooltips instead of the custom tooltips. I don't know either, so I asked Larry Osterman, who was in charge of the Volume icon. And he didn't know either. He was merely given new icons by the design team. But that doesn't stop...

How does the MultiByteToWideChar function treat invalid characters?

May 4, 2012 May 4, 2012 05/4/12
Raymond Chen
The MB_ERR_INVALID_CHARS flag controls how the Multi­Byte­To­Wide­Char function treats invalid characters. Some people claim that the following sentences in the documentation are contradictory: "Starting with Windows Vista, the function does not drop illegal code points if the application does not set the flag." "Windows...
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How does Explorer calculate the folder size information in the folder tooltip?

May 3, 2012 May 3, 2012 05/3/12
Raymond Chen
This information is accurate as of Windows 7; the algorithm may change for future versions of Windows. The information is being provided for the edification of computer network administrators, who are curious about random stuff like this since it can affect their network load. When you hover over a folder, Explorer shows an infotip (a ...

Why is there sometimes a long delay between pressing a hotkey for a shortcut and opening the shortcut?

May 2, 2012 May 2, 2012 05/2/12
Raymond Chen
Via a customer liaison, we received a problem report from a customer. The customer is facing issues with delayed desponses to opening a .lnk file by pressing its keyboard shortcut hotkey. This delay does not appear when the shortcut is double-clicked. For example, the customer has created a shortcut to Notepad and assigned it the shortcut ...

What happened to the Summary information created on Windows 2000 and Windows XP?

May 1, 2012 May 1, 2012 05/1/12
Raymond Chen
In Windows 2000 and Windows XP, you could add Summary information on the Details property page to files of all types. Text files, image files, some crazy file your grandmother sent you in a file format you don't know how to open. If Windows supports storing the Summary information in the file itself (for example, in EXIF tags or in...