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By definition, the primary monitor is the monitor that has (0,0) as its upper left corner. Why can't the primary monitor be positioned somewhere else? Well, sure you could do that, but then you'd have to invent a new name for the monitor whose upper left corner is at (0,0), and then you're back where you started. In other words, it's just a name....

Commenter winhelp (probably not his/her real name) wonders what happened to WinHelp.exe. I don't know, but it turns out the answer was already known to the Internet. At the time the question was posted, the answer was already in the Wikipedia entry for Windows Help—it even had a citation! The question does highlight another one of those n...

The story We Burned the Poop reminded me of an embarrassing story a colleague of mine related from earlier in his programming career. During the development of the product he was working on, the programmers needed an image for a comparatively rarely-used piece of the user interface. Since programmers aren't graphic designers, they inserted a plac...

I think the behavior is more petulant than finicky, but finicky is alliterative. Back in the days of Windows 95, I was talking with the person responsible for, among other things, the floppy disk driver, and I learned about a particular driver hack that was needed to work around a flaw in a very common motherboard chipset. Apparently the flo...

The person responsible for the floppy disk driver in Windows 95 also was responsible for the low-level CD-ROM drivers. (Not to be confused with the CDFS file system, which was handled by the file system team, not the hardware driver folks.) And I remember a story about one particularly strange CD-ROM drive. This drive was produced by a name-b...

Commenter Jeff asks what the PRE in PREfast stands for. It's an inside joke. The Microsoft Programmer Productivity Research Center (MSPPRC) originally produced a tool called PREfix. Michael Howard put me in touch with the development team, and they explained that it was called PREfix because it helps you fix your bugs before (PRE) you even run...

When you copy multiple files in Windows Vista, the progress dialog gives you an estimate of the time remaining as well as an indication of what fraction of the operation has been completed. But one thing it doesn't tell you is the name of the file currently being copied. Why not? The programmer responsible for the file copy progress dialog in Wind...

Recall that a corrupted program sometimes results in a "Program too big to fit in memory" error. In response, Dog complained that while that may have been a reasonable response back in the 1980's, in today's world, there's plenty of memory around for the MS-DOS emulator to add that extra check and return a better error code. Well yeah, but if yo...

There are six styles available to the static controls which draw frames and rectangles in one of three fixed colors: But if you actually create a static control with one of these styles, you'll find that the color isn't actually black, gray, or white. So why are they called black, gray, and white? Because they used to be black, gray, and white....

bhiggins asks about the mysterious function that existed in some versions of the Win32 documentation. I went digging through the MSDN archives and was close to giving up and declaring the cause lost, but then I found it: A copy of the documentation. EnumClaw The EnumClaw function returns the child or the parent of the window whose HWND is...