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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.

During the preparations for the 2005 PDC, I was filling out an application for a corporate credit card. (The rant behind why I was filling out this application in the first place will have to wait for another day.) One of the options was to check a box to request rush processing at an additional charge of $10. There was one key piece of informatio...

The ironic thing about fixing a bug, or at least once I mention on this web site that I fixed a particular bug, is that people immediately complain that I didn't fix some other bug. One school of complaint believes that cosmetic bugs should be fixed first: "You suck. I mean, look at these egregious cosmetic bugs. If you can't get even those righ...

I post this entry with great reluctance, because I can feel the heat from the pilot lights of the flame throwers all the way from here. The struggle with the network interoperability problem continued for several months after I brought up the topic. In that time, a significant number of network attached storage devices were found that did not imp...

Now that computer security grabs headlines, the crackpots are drawn to it. This means that the security folks are innundated with dubious vulnerability reports and revolutionary computer designs. Today's story is one of the "revolutionary computer designs" category. I have developed a complete solution to computer security. Construct one case ...

The Windows file has a switch whose name would lead you to believe that it sets the maximum amount of memory that Windows will use. But that's not what it does; the name is misleading. What the flag really does is set the maximum physical address that Windows will scan in search of RAM. If your physical memory map contains discontiguous chunks ...