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I had removed the cover from one of the computers in my office in order to upgrade one of its hard drives (from 20GB to 200GB, woo-hoo). The hard drives are kept in a removable cage, so first I had to unscrew the cage, then unscrew the drive from the cage, then swap in the new drive. Of course, you don't screw everything back in until you've tested...

Like this is something that should be optimized?

Some time ago, there was a product under development that was starting to get some buzz, so I thought I'd go check it out. I went to the product's Web site, but the product was so new that they didn't have any substantial information available. The only way to learn about the product was to download the documentation. And before they would let me d...

Some people can't get over the initial burst of adrenaline when they think they've found a security vulnerability and rush to file a report with Microsoft so they can get credit for it and add it to their "security vulnerability portfolio" to show that they are so wicked cool. Learning that what they found isn't a security vulnerability isn't goin...

Steve Rowe linked to an essay on why computers can't play Go well even though they've mastered other "difficult" games like chess. I was reminded of a description I received of what happens backstage at computer Go tournaments (i.e., tournaments that pit Go-playing computers against each other). ("Backstage" is a bit of a misnomer, of course; s...

If you use the Image File Execution Options registry key to force a program to run under the debugger, all the kernel does is insert the debugger in front of the command line. In other words, the function figure out what program is about to be run and checks the Image File Execution Options. If it finds a debugger, then the debugger is prepended ...

is a bad idea and you shouldn't call it. In the comments, many people proposed changes to the function to improve the implementation. But what's the point? is just a bad idea. There's no point improving the implementation of a bad idea. On the other hand, some people suggested making it clear that is a bad idea by making it worse. While this...

In addition to testing out the Windows XP Start menu on beginners, we asked advanced users (including lots of system administrators) what they thought of it, and the response was still positive. This was kind of surprising, for advanced users tend to be resistant to change. In fact, system administrators like the new Start menu so much that t...

Actually, I discussed this topic already, but I'm mentioning it again here since it's thematically related to the other Start menu articles. I'm told that there have been a few tweaks to the rules for Windows Vista. Some installers set the time stamps on the program to match the time stamp of the install media. This makes for pretty director...

If you paid really close attention to the way a representative shortcut is selected for a program, you may have noticed a problem with it. Here's the rule again: If there are multiple shortcuts to the same program, then the most-frequently-used shortcut is selected as the one to appear on the front page of the Start menu. Suppose there are two...