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If the system directory is always , why is there a special function to get it? Because it wasn't always that. For 16-bit programs on Windows NT, the system directory is . That's also the name of the system directory for Windows 95-based systems and all the 16-bit versions of Windows. But even in the 16-bit world, if it was always...

There are two ways of declaring COM interfaces, the hard way and the easy way. The easy way is to use an IDL file and let the MIDL compiler generate your COM interface for you. If you let MIDL do the work, then you also get __uuidof support at no extra charge, which is a very nice bonus. The hard way is to do it all by hand. If you choose th...

I didn't debug it personally, but I know the people who did. During Windows XP development, a bug arrived on a computer game that crashed only after you got to one of the higher levels. After many saved and restored games, the problem was finally identified. The program does its video work in an offscreen buffer and transfers it to the sc...

It's a balance between performance and performance.

Even though Windows NT uses UTC internally, the BIOS clock stays on local time. Why is that? There are a few reasons. One is a chain of backwards compatibility. In the early days, people often dual-booted between Windows NT and MS-DOS/Windows 3.1. MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 operate on local time, so Windows NT followed sui...

The various Interlocked functions (InterlockedIncrement, and so on) require that the variable being updated be properly aligned, even on x86, a platform where the CPU silently fixes unaligned memory access invisibly. If you pass an unaligned pointer to one of the Interlocked functions, the operation will still succeed, but the result won't be ato...

Sometimes unaligned memory access will hang the machine. Some video cards do not let you access all the video memory at one go. Instead, you are given a window into which you can select which subset of video memory ("bank") you want to see. For example, the EGA video card had 256K of memory, split into four 64K banks. If you wanted to access memo...

It was designed when computers were a lot slower.

Borders and 3D come and go like fashions.

Pushing the specification to extremes.