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Ah, the Alpha AXP.

The function returns two pieces of information. The return value is the amount of memory needed to record the version information of a file, and the pointed to by the parameter is set to zero. What's the deal with this strange parameter? That parameter used to do something. The documentation for used to read dwHandle: The value returned by ...

Back in 2004, we lost Dave's frame class. Dave's frame class, or more accurately, DavesFrameClass, was the window class that drew the CPU meter on the Performance page of Task Manager. As you might have guessed, Dave was the name of the original author of Task Manager. (If the checked version of Task Manager from NT 4 encountered an internal ...

If your program runs haywire, you will find that it manages to create about 10,000 window manager objects and then the system won't let it have any more. Why stop at 10,000? The first answer is "If you have to ask, you're probably doing something wrong." Programs shouldn't be creating anywhere near ten thousands window manager objects in the first...

We left off our story last time by raising the problem of programs that send messages to windows that have already been destroyed and how window handle re-use exacerbates the problem. Although this is clearly a bug in the programs that use window handles after destroying the window, the problem is so widespread that the window manager folks in Wind...

(Prefatory remark: The following information is of the "behind the scenes" nature and does not constitute formal documentation. Actually, nothing I write counts as formal documentation, so I shouldn't have needed to write that, but people sometimes intentionally play stupid and interpret all forms of the future tense as if I were making some sort ...

Back in Windows 95, there was an elusive heap corruption bug in the graphics engine, and after a lot of analysis, the graphics folks were convinced that the corruption was coming from outside their component, and they had a pretty good idea who the corruptor was, but they needed proof. One of the standard techniques of narrowing down the sour...

Commenter Brian Reiter asks a duplicate of a question that was already submitted to the Suggestion Box: Darren asks why operating system† files still (for the most part) adhere to the old 8.3 naming convention. There are a few reasons I can think of. I'm not saying that these are the reasons; I'm just brainstorming. First, of course, ...

Jason Doucette asks how slow a machine has to be to be considered a . The answer: Pretty darned slow by today's standards. When the metric was introduced in Windows 95, the definition of a "slow machine" was as follows (roughly): That bit about the display driver is a little strange. Windows actually trusted display drivers to report whe...

Larry Osterman explains in a two-part series, The sad story of CoGetMalloc and Why was the ability to specify an allocator during CoInitialize removed from the system?