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I'm kind of surprised at how much people reacted to my previous dead computer story. I guess there's an audience for stories about dead computers. Today's dead computer is my Sony Vaio PCG-Z505LE laptop, with a 600MHz processor and 192MB of RAM. Certainly a big step up from that 486/50 with 12MB of RAM. Laptop computers have a comparatively shor...

A bunch of us were going through some Windows crashes that people sent in by clicking the "Send Error Report" button in the crash dialog. And there were huge numbers of them that made no sense whatsoever. For example, there would be code sequences like this: Yet when we looked at the error report, the and registers were equal! There were othe...

My building was scheduled for a carpet replacement—in all my years at Microsoft, I think this is the first time this has ever happened to a building I was in—so we all had to pack up our things so the carpeters could get clear access to the floor. You go through all the pain of an office move (packing all your things) but don't get the ...

On one of our internal mailing lists, someone was wondering why their expensive four-processor computer appeared to be using only one of its processors. From Task Manager's performance tab, the chart showed that the first processor was doing all the work and the other three processors were sitting idle. Using Task Manager to set each process's proc...

Today, I'm not writing anything new. Instead, I'm referring you to the series of articles by Ruediger Asche starting with Windows NT Security in Theory and Practice. These articles are quite old but the principles are still sound. Just bear in mind that the newer stuff won't be covered.

A common feature for many applications is to record their screen location when they shut down and reopen at that location when relaunched. If implemented naively, a program merely restores from its previous position unconditionally. You run into usability problems with this naive implementation. If a user runs two copies of your program, the two w...

In the operating systems group, we have to take a holistic view of performance. The goal is to get the entire system running faster, balancing applications against each other for the greater good. Applications, on the other hand, tend to have a selfish view of performance: "I will do everything possible to make myself run faster. The impact on th...

Remember that there are typically two 8-bit code pages active, the so-called "ANSI" code page and the so-called "OEM" code page. GUI programs usually use the ANSI code page for 8-bit files (though utf-8 is becoming more popular lately), whereas console programs usually use the OEM code page. This means, for example, when you open an 8-bit text fil...

It seems that when people notice that the Internet Explorer rendering engine doesn't use HWNDs for screen elements, they think that Internet Explorer is somehow "cheating" and doing something "undocumented" and has an "unfair advantage". Nevermind that windowless controls have been around since 1996. They aren't magic. Mind you, they're a lot of ...

In a previous life, I wrote database software. A customer complained that one of their reports was taking an unacceptably long amount of time to generate, and I was asked to take a look at it even though it wasn't my account. The report was a vacation-days report, listing the number of vacation days taken and available for each employee. Vacati...