Ignoring the warnings and then complaining that the bad thing that happens happened.
In the Performance Options control panel, on the tab labeled Visual Effects, there is a radio button called Adjust for best performance. If you select it, then all the visual effects are disabled. But the name of that radio button has been wrong for a long time. It doesn't actually adjust your visual effects for best performance. It just adjusts ...
A customer wanted to know how to hide the libraries named Public (Documents), Public Pictures, and Public Videos on all computers in their organization. It turns out that this is already documented in TechNet under the topic Administrative How-to Guides (I found this page by issuing a Web search for ⟨library-ms⟩.) The customer is sp...
A customer observed that if they use Explorer to view the timestamp on a file, it is not always in agreement with the value shown if they run a plain in a command prompt. They are sometimes off by an hour. Why is that? Whenever you hear the phrase "off by an hour" you should immediately think "Daylight Saving Time". The formatting of file tim...
When you type a phrase into the Windows Vista Start menu's search box and click Search the Internet, then the Start menu hands the query off to your default Internet search provider. Or at least that's what the Illuminati would have you believe. A customer reported that when they typed a phrase into the Search box and clicked Search the Inter...
It's a case of filesystem-colored glasses.
I'm going to be lazy today and make you solve the problem. Did a recent security hotfix change change the way we handle UNC paths with spaces? Normally, if we open the Run dialog and type , the folder opens. But recently it stopped working. Instead of opening the folder, we get the Open With dialog: Choose the program yo...
A customer wanted to know how they could improve the security of USB thumb drives in their organization. Specifically, they wanted to block access to removable media devices (primarily USB thumb drives), but provide a list of exceptions for specific thumb drives. Fortunately, there's a whitepaper that covers exactly this topic and explains how to ...
The keyboard shortcut for resizing all columns in a report-mode (also known as Details mode) list view control to fit the current content width is Ctrl+Num+. That's the + key on the numeric keypad. (If you're using Explorer, you can also right-click the column header and choose Size All Columns to Fit.) Note that this command is a verb, not a st...
A customer asked, "Does NTFS support files with a null string as the name?" No, NTFS does not support files with no name. None of the commonly-used Windows file systems do. Files must have a name. But what a strange question that is. The customer was kind enough to explain why they cared. "We have a zip file that the Compressed Folders (Zip folde...
