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A customer asked the following question (paraphrased): Does the Windows XP Add/Remove Programs control panel expose a scriptable object model? We want our program to open the Add/Remove Programs control panel and uninstall the programs of our competitors. No, there is no object model for the Add and Remove Programs control panel, and it fri...

Earlier, we learned that help text is not the place to put logic puzzles. Neither are dialog boxes. I ran across a configuration dialog box that had the item Turn off Feature X This is a negative-sense checkbox, which turns your dialog box into a logic puzzle. Checkboxes should be phrased positively. Use Feature X (The only except...

This weekend marks the beginning of Daylight Saving Time in most parts of the United States, the first year under the new transition rules in the Energy Policy Act of 2005. Pay extra attention to your clocks this weekend. If you have a device that automatically adjusts for Daylight Saving Time, and it hasn't been updated for the new transition rul...

The title of this entry is a bad pun on a catchphrase from 1970s television. I apologize to those for whom the 1970s are a bad memory. A snippet of Microspeak that bothers me is the verb phrase "to sit in". Example: "I'm in the Nosebleed group which sits in Bob Smith's organization." I think it means "to be a part of" but I'm not quite sure. Ma...

An anonymous commenter suggested that we should give up on "hiding protected operating system files". After all, if we "protect operating system files", that should be enough, shouldn't it? Well, except that some files are still hidden even though they are not protected. For example, your encryption keys are fully accessible to you (after all, th...

If you ever gone spelunking in the registry key, you've no doubt found the user named . Who is this guy? Despite its name, the profile for the .Default user is not the default user profile. It's actually the profile for the Local System account and is an alias for . ( is the security identifier for the Local System account.) Consequently, setting...

If you have to ask about various operating system limits, you're probably doing something wrong. If you're nesting windows more than 50 levels deep or nesting menus more than 25 levels deep or creating a dialog box with more than 65535 controls, or nesting tree-view items more than 255 levels deep, then your user interface design is in serious ...

This computer didn't die like the previous one; it merely outlived it usefulness. In its prime, the machine was a force to be reckoned with. It was about the size of a small refrigerator and generated about as much noise as a vacuum cleaner. It contained four, count 'em, four Alpha AXP processors, each running at a mind-boggling 400 MHz...

One phenomenon I've noticed quite a bit is something I'm going to call "technology hypochondria", the belief that you are suffering from whatever problem you just read about. It reminds me of this joke: A man goes to his doctor. "Doctor," he says, "I'm pretty sure I've got this disease here. All the symptoms match. I'm suffering from fatigue, s...

Long Zheng followed up on the story of where the default wallpapers in Windows Vista came from and managed to score an interview with Hamad Darwish, one of those amateur photographers.