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(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?

If you try to set the current directory of a command prompt, you get the error message "CMD does not support UNC paths as current directories." What's going on here? It's MS-DOS backwards compatibility. If the current directory were a UNC, there wouldn't be anything to return to MS-DOS programs when they call function 19h (Get current drive). Tha...

If you look at the documentation for the function, you'll see that it calls out different behavior depending on whether you're running Windows 95 or Windows NT. Commenter Vipin asked why Windows NT doesn't follow Windows 95's lead. Back in the old days, 16-bit Windows did unregister classes automatically when a DLL unloaded. ...

In Windows 95, if you had a shortcut to a file on the desktop, view the shortcut's properties, and then clicked "Find Target", you got the message "The target you specified is on the desktop". It also selected the item on the desktop to help you find it. But why didn't it just open an Explorer window that viewed the desktop? Because in Windo...

Ah, the ISA bus...

Windows Vista needed some new wallpapers. Where to get them? Historically, they were purchased from a professional service, which is expensive since Microsoft would need worldwide rights to reproduce (not just use) the image, and not just for a few months, but for decades. Besides, there are a lot of good amateur photographers at Microsoft who woul...