Showing tag results for Tips/Support

Feb 21, 2012
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Why don't music files show up in my Recent Items list?

Raymond Chen

If you double-click a music file, it doesn't show up in your Recent Items list. What's so special about music files? The technical reason is that the file types are registered with the flag, which means that they don't show up in the Recent Items list (formerly known as Recent Documents), and they don't show up in the Recent or Frequent section ...

Tips/Support
Jan 3, 2012
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Why don't ZIP files have the FILE_ATTRIBUTE_COMPRESSED attribute?

Raymond Chen

A customer reported that when they called on a ZIP file, the attribute was not returned. But ZIP files are compressed. Why isn't the attribute being set? Because tells you whether the file was compressed by the file system. It is not a flag which describes the semantics of the bytes stored in the file. After all, the file system doesn't know ...

Tips/Support
Dec 26, 2011
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Why is the file size reported incorrectly for files that are still being written to?

Raymond Chen

The shell team often gets questions like these from customers: Attached please find a sample program which continuously writes data to a file. If you open the folder containing the file in Explorer, you can see that the file size is reported as zero. Even manually refreshing the Explorer window does not update the file size. Even the command sh...

Tips/Support
Dec 6, 2011
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A feature I didn't even know existed much less had a name: Color hot-track

Raymond Chen

I hadn't even noticed this until somebody pointed it out: When you hover your mouse over a button in the Windows 7 taskbar which corresponds to a running application, the taskbar button lights up in a color that matches the colors in the icon itself. (And even more subtly, the lighting effect is centered on the mouse.) This feature even has ...

Tips/Support
Oct 19, 2011
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Why do some infotips repeat the name of the item as well as the infotip?

Raymond Chen

A customer noticed that when the user hovered over their application name in the Start menu, the infotip that pops up includes their product name: ... but no other program on the Start menu included the product name in the description: The customer compared their shortcut with the other ones but couldn't find anything that was telling Explorer,...

CodeTips/Support
Oct 11, 2011
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Why does copying a file to my USB thumb drive say that the parameter is incorrect?

Raymond Chen

Consider the following sequence of operations, assuming that F: is a USB thumb drive with plenty of disk space. Why is the second file copy failing? The hint is the file extension: *.iso, which suggests that this is a CD or DVD image, and DVD images have the feature that they tend to be really big. Like more than 4GB big. USB thumb drives...

Tips/Support
Oct 6, 2011
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Why can't I move the Program Files directory via the unattend file?

Raymond Chen

We saw last time that the unattend file lets you change some Windows configuration settings that cannot be changed after Setup is complete. But one of the things you can't change is the location of the Program Files directory. Many people wish they could relocate their Program Files directory to another drive in order to relieve disk space pressur...

Tips/Support
Oct 5, 2011
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The unattend file lets you configure Windows while it's installing, and in some cases it's your only chance

Raymond Chen

Some Windows settings can only be established as part of the installation process. This is done with a so-called unattend file. (Remember, no matter where you put an advanced setting, somebody will tell you that you are an idiot.) In earlier versions of Windows, the unattend file took the form of an INI file, but Windows Vista hopped aboard t...

Tips/Support