Showing tag results for Tips/Support

Hybrid sleep is a type of sleep state that combines sleep and hibernate. When you put the computer into a hybrid sleep state, it writes out all its RAM to the hard drive (just like a hibernate), and then goes into a low power state that keeps RAM refreshed (just like a sleep). The idea is that you can resume the computer quickly from sleep, but if...

A customer liaison had the following question: My customer has ZIP files stored on a remote server being accessed from a machine running Windows Server 2003 and Internet Explorer Enhanced Security Configuration. When we extract files from the ZIP file, the last-modified time is set to the current time rather than the time specified in the ZIP fil...

One of the audio features added to Windows 7 goes by the formal name stream attenuation, but it is more commonly known to people in the audio world as ducking. Ducking is the process of lowering the volume of background sounds in order to draw more attention to the foreground sound. For example, when you're watching a big battle scene in a s...

Anonymous bemoans the fact that pinning programs to the Start menu (in Windows XP) actually pins the shortcut rather than the program itself. This means that if you right-click on a shortcut to pin it, then delete the shortcut, the pinned item stops working. How do you pin the program directly? You pin the program directly by right-clicking ...

A customer reported that a shortcut they deployed to their employees' desktops was triggering unwanted server traffic. My customer deploys a shortcut on %ALLUSERSPROFILE%\Desktop, and this shortcut points to an EXE file on a remote server. Once a local user logs on, the computer will try logging onto the remote computer to query information and g...

When you access a resource via a UNC, the Windows network redirector keeps the virtual circuit open for a while even after you close the resource. This is done to take advantage of locality: If you access a network resource once, you're probably going to access it again in a short time, so the redirector leaves the connection open for a little bit...

A customer liaison contacted the shell team with the following request: Subject: Support case: 069314718055994 On two of my customer's machines, he's finding that if he opens %TEMP% from the Start menu, it opens C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Temp\1, C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Temp\2, and so on. Each time the user logs off and back on, the ...

If you find an old Windows XP machine and fire up the configuration dialog for the Marquee screen saver, you'll see that the text field for entering the message won't let you type more than 255 characters. That's because the Marquee screen saver uses a 255-character buffer to hold the message, and the dialog box figure there's no point in lett...

Buried in the theme file documentation is a section called [Slideshow] which lets you control the source for images that are used when you put the desktop wallpaper in slideshow mode. And a bonus feature hidden in the [Slideshow] section is the ability to draw the images from an RSS feed. After creating the .theme file, double-click it and it will...

A customer reported an apparent inconsistency in the shell common file dialogs: The question mark appears to be treated differently from other invalid file name characters. I tried to save a file in Paint under the name but instead of telling me that I had an invalid character in the file name (as it does with other characters like and ) or nav...