Showing results for History - The Old New Thing

Nov 21, 2003
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Why isn't Fast User Switching enabled on domains?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Windows XP added a new feature called Fast User Switching which lets you switch between users without having to log off. But this feature is disabled if your computer is joined to a domain. Why? There were several reasons, none of them individually insurmountable, but they added up to quite a lot of work for something IT administrators weren't ev...

History
Nov 17, 2003
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More stories of bad hardware

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

My favorite bad CD-ROM drive from Windows 95 was one where the manufacturer cut a corner to save probably twenty-five cents. The specification for CD-ROM controllers indicates that each can host up to four CD-ROM drives. When you talk to the card, you specify which drive you wish to communicate with. The manufacturer of a certain brand of contr...

History
Nov 3, 2003
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The long and sad story of the Shell Folders key

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

When you are attempting to architect an operating system, backwards compatibility is one of the ones you just have to accept. But when new programs rely on app hacks designed for old programs, that makes you want to scream. Once upon a time, in what seems like a galaxy far far away (a Windows 95 beta release known as "M3"), we documented a regi...

CodeHistory
Oct 30, 2003
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I thought you said people don't know how to read analog clocks

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

I had mentioned in passing in a comment on 10/10/2003 10:07PM that one of the reasons the clock on the taskbar isn't analog is that some disturbingly high percentage of people (30%? 40%? I forget exactly) do not know how to read an analog clock. Yet there is is in the Longhorn sidebar. What g...

History
Oct 28, 2003
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When vendors insult themselves

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

During Windows 95, when we were building the Plug and Play infrastructure, we got an angry letter from a hardware vendor (who shall remain nameless) complaining that we intentionally misspelled their company name in our INF files in a manner that made their company name similar to an insulting word. ...

History
Oct 24, 2003
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Why Daylight Savings Time is nonintuitive

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Daylight Savings Time ends this weekend in most of North America and Europe, so it seems a good time to discuss the whole problem of Daylight Savings Time and timestamps.

HistoryTime
Oct 22, 2003
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What's the deal with those reserved filenames like NUL and CON?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Set the wayback machine to DOS 1.0. DOS 1.0 didn't support subdirectories, lowercase, or filenames longer than 8.3. When you ran the assembler (or compiler if you were really fancy) the conversation went something like this:    the ".asm" extension on "foo" is...

History
Oct 20, 2003
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What is the Alt+Tab order?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

What determines the order in which icons appear in the Alt+Tab list? The icons appear in the same order as the window Z-order. When you switch to a window, then it comes to the top of the Z-order. If you minimize a window, it goes to the bottom of the Z-order. The Alt+Esc hotkey (gosh, does anybody s...

History
Oct 17, 2003
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Don't let Marketing mess with your slides

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

It's PDC season, so I thought I'd relate an anecdote about a conference from many years ago. I forget which conference it was, maybe GCDC 1996, we were all busy preparing our presentations and submitted them to the Microsoft conference representatives so they could apply the standard template...

History