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I often find myself saying, "I bet somebody got a really nice bonus for that feature." "That feature" is something aggressively user-hostile, like forcing a shortcut into the Quick Launch bar or the Favorites menu, like automatically turning on a taskbar toolbar, like adding an icon to the notification area that conveys no useful information but ...

The folks over at TechNet Magazine have done something really cool: They've started translating all their articles into Spanish, French, German, Russian, Brazilian Portuguese, and Simplified Chinese. (But no Swedish.) You can change your language on the fly with the combo box in the corner. (MSDN Magazine is doing the same thing. It's an epi...

Now that my old computer is up on bricks in the virtual front yard, the scavenging has begun. I got a piece of email from one of my colleagues saying, "Say, you aren't using that PC-2100 memory any more are you?" Why no, in fact, I wasn't. Christmas comes early. (He offered to buy the memory off of me, but since I had already written the old comp...

Last time, I told of attempting to upgrade my home computer and failing. I ultimately gave up and returned the parts to the store, telling them that I thought the IDE controller on the motherboard was dead. They refunded my money after a false step where they refunded me more than I paid for the components in the first place! (I bought the motherb...

Yes, I said that my next dead computer story would be the AlphaServer, but late-breaking news has forced me to shuffle the order a bit. My home computer has been circling the drain for several months. (The Northbridge fan would buzz and sometimes spin really slowly.) When the motherboard finally stopped powering on, I knew its time was up. Being...

Help text is not the place to put logic puzzles. In Windows Vista, when you go to the System control panel, you are shown a number that describes your computer's rating. But are higher numbers better or worse? If I had a choice, would it be better to have a 1 rating or a 5 rating? In earlier betas of Windows Vista, you had to ...

Windows still has to worry about displays running at 640×480 resolution. Even though the default minimum resolution was bumped up to 800×600 for Windows XP, there are still 640×480 devices out there, typically tiny monitors on servers. One common set-up is to have a bank of tiny little monitors, each corresponding to one serv...

There is a stock collection of fake names.

Somebody at a meeting two years ago used the term "goat rodeo" to describe a completely confused situation. The term stuck with me as a really funny folksy analogy. It's not official Microspeak, but who knows, it may someday gain currency. I certainly enjoy saying it. "Goat rodeo." "Goat rodeo." "Goat rodeo." (Some earlier Microspeak entries: ...

For some reason, people are upset that I don't have hard data for the cost difference between "slow" and "fast" mode enumeration. I already did a back-of-the-envelope calculation that showed that fast mode reduces the total time to enumerate the items in a folder from five minutes to two seconds. That's what's so great about back-of-the-envelope ca...