Lessons I learned from working in product support the past few days:

But it's not finished yet. I hope to get to it later this week.

If you dig back into your Windows 95 files, you'll find that some internal system functions are given names like , and . Surely there is a story behind these silly names, isn't there? Of course there is. "Bear" is the name of the Windows 3.1 mascot, a stuffed teddy bear seemingly-obsessively ...

I got up at 5 this morning to spend the day at Product Support Services answering phones: today was the day the Blaster worm launched its second wave. And by a startling coincidence, the person at the station next to me was Michael Howard our Senior Security Program Manager and author of Writing ...

The WM_SIZING handler intercepts only interactive resizing. If the user right-clicks the taskbar and selects "Cascade Windows", this resizes the window directly without going through the interactive WM_SIZING step

The inner workings of the Windows 95 memory manager's bootstrap algorithm.

Enforcing integrality solves the fractional-line problem, but notice that when you grab the top or bottom edge and resize the window, the resize feedback doesn't match the actual window you get back if you drag the window to a non-integral size. (You may need to turn off full window drag to see this effect more...

"Why can't I remove 'for test/evaluation purposes only'? I know I'm running an evaluation edition, I don't need it rubbed in my face." This prevents unscrupulous OEMs from selling machines with the evaluation edition of the product instead of the retail version. (Yes, this has happened before. Many ...

If you play around with resizing the window, you can get a fractional line to appear at the bottom of the screen. This is not normally a problem until you scroll to the very end of the list, say, by pressing the key, at which point an ugly blank space appears at the bottom. This ugly blank space is particularl...

What is the significance of the cast in the computation of ? It isn't. I got the question wrong. The real question should have been "What is the significance of the cast in the computation of ?" The answer is to ensure that the computation is performed with signed integers throughout. ...