In the original release of Windows 95, you could change your time zone by clicking on the map, and the time zone you selected would highlight. Similarly, you could change your Region Settings by clicking on the world map. This was one of those little touches that made Windows 95 that much more fun to use. ...

GetWindowText() is more complicated than you think. The documentation tries to explain its complexity with small words, which is great if you don't understand long words, but it also means that you're not getting the full story. Here's an attempt to give the full story. How windows manage the...

At the Windows 95 Launch and at various other marketing events, guests were given a copy of "Windows 95 Special Edition". What is so special about the box? Answer: The box. The contents of the box are exactly the same as a regular copy of Windows 95. The only thing special about it...

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...