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One of the flags you can pass to is , which is documented as : Trade memory for speed. This documentation is already vague since it doesn't say which direction the trade is being made. Are you reducing memory to increase speed, or increasing memory by reducing speed? Actually it's neither: If you pass this flag, then you are instructing COM to...

We saw a while ago that the function returns at the slightest provocation. Why can't it return something more meaningful? The short-term answer is that the return value from is both a success code and an error code, and you check whether the value is greater than 32 to see which half you're in. In particular, the error code case is if the va...

Microsoft has a large corporate recycling effort. Every office, every mail room, every kitchenette, every conference room has a recycling bin. The dining facilities earned Green Restaurant Certification, and there is a goal of making the cafeterias a zero-landfill facility by 2012. (Hey, that's this year!) A few years ago, I found one room in m...

Today is the (approximate) 15th anniversary of the Bedlam Incident. To commemorate that event, here's a story of another email incident gone horribly awry. Some time ago, an email message was sent to a large mailing list. It came from somebody in the IT department and said roughly, "This is a mail sent on behalf of Person X to check if your ...

Ian B wondered what the difference is between pressing F5 and F8 while Windows is booting. I have no idea either. My strategy was to just mash on the function keys, space bar, DEL key, anything else I can think of. Keep pressing them all through the boot process, and maybe a boot menu will show up. The F5 hotkey was introduced in Windows 95...

In a discussion of the now-vestigial parameter to the function, Neil asks, "Weren't there sufficient API differences (e.g. WM_CTLCOLOR) between Win16 and Win32 to justify changing the definitions to eliminate the superfluous handle?" The goal of Win32 was to provide as much backward compatibility with existing 16-bit source code as can be pra...

Starting in Windows 2000 and continuing through Windows Vista, you could drag a folder out of Explorer and slam it into the edge of the screen. When you let go, it docked itself to that edge of the screen like a toolbar. A customer noticed that this stopped working in Windows 7 and asked, "Was this feature dropped in Windows 7, ...

Commenter HiTechHiTouch wants to know whether the "X-Mouse" feature went through the "every request starts at −100 points filter", and if so, how did it manage to gain 99 points? The X-Mouse feature is ancient and long predates the "−100 points" rule. It was added back in the days when a developer could add a random rogue feature bec...

Anon wants to know why I am listed in the credits for the video game Quake under the "Special Thanks" section. "Were you an early tester/debugger?" I've never played a game of Quake in my entire life. I (and most of the rest of the Windows 95 team) played DOOM, but after a while, first-person-shooter games started giving me a headache. By ...

I noted some time ago that real-mode Windows had to do all its memory management without any hardware assistance. And yet, along the way, they managed to implement an LRU-based discard algorithm. Gabe is really interested in how that was done. As we saw a few months ago, inter-segment calls were redirected through a little stub which either ju...