Showing tag results for Tips/Support

Nov 5, 2010
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Why does the Win32 Time service require the date to be correct before it will set the time?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Public Service Announcement: Daylight Saving Time ends in most parts of the United States this weekend. Andy points out that if you attempt to synchronize your clock when the date is set incorrectly, the operation fails with the error message "An error occurred while Windows was synchronizing with time.windows.com. For security reasons, Windows ca...

Tips/SupportTime
Sep 29, 2010
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Where did my mail control panel icon go?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

A customer ran into the following problem: I was trying to add another email account to Outlook, and the instructions say that I should go to the mail icon in the Control Panel, which to my surprise is nowhere to be found! How can I figure out what went wrong? A little bit of psychic debugging will solve this. The customer was running Windows&n...

Tips/Support
Sep 15, 2010
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How do I create a UNC to an IPv6 address?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Windows UNC notation permits you to use a raw IPv4 address in dotted notation as a server name: For example, will show you the shared resources on the computer whose IP address is 127.0.0.1. But what about IPv6 addresses? IPv6 notation contains colons, which tend to mess up file name parsing since a colon is not a valid character in a path compone...

Tips/Support
Sep 7, 2010
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How do I customize the order of items in the All Programs section of the Start menu?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

The items in the All Programs section of the Start menu are grouped into two sections, although there are no visible divider lines between them. We saw earlier that the Fast Items lost their special status in Windows Vista and are sorted with the regular items. Another change from Windows XP is the order of the remaining two groups: W...

Tips/Support
Aug 31, 2010
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Shutdown reason codes are reason codes, not error codes or HRESULTs

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

A customer liaison asked the following question on behalf of his customer: My customer is finding that their Windows Server 2003 system has restarted, and they want to find out why. I've found some event log similar to the ones below, but I don't know what error code is. I've searched the Knowledge Base but couldn't find anything relevant. Ple...

Tips/Support
Aug 19, 2010
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How do I get the Explorer navigation pane to highlight the current folder all the time?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

In Windows 7, the folder tree in the Explorer navigation pane by default no longer highlights the item in the view pane. This change was based on user testing and feedback, but if, like me, you prefer things the old way, you can play with two new check boxes on the Folder Options dialog. You can get to Folder Options in a variety of ways: ...

Tips/Support
Jul 14, 2010
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Why don't all the Control Panel applications show up when you open a menu from the address bar?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

One of the features added to the Explorer Address Bar in Windows Vista is the ability to navigate quickly to an item by clicking on its name, or navigate to a folder's children by clicking the arrow that appears next to the item and selecting your destination. One customer reported that there appeared to be a problem with the Control Panel: Switc...

Tips/Support
Jul 8, 2010
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How do I configure a Remote Desktop Connection shortcut to open on a specific monitor?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

A customer wanted to know how to configure a Remote Desktop Connection shortcut so that the session appears on the monitor of choice. "I have two RDP shortcuts, and each one displays on a different monitor, but I want them all to display on my 20-inch monitor. How do I tell the bad shortcut, 'Hey, use that monitor over there please'?" Normal shell...

Tips/Support
Jun 24, 2010
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When setting expectations, you also have to deny them when necessary

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Occasionally the shell team will get a request from a customer via their customer liaison that requests information on how to accomplish something or other, and before we'll answer the question, we want to know what the support boundaries are. For example, we might provide a mechanism that works on Windows Vista but comes with no guarantees th...

Tips/Support
Jun 22, 2010
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How do I customize the Favorite Links section of the File Open dialog?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

In the standard File Open dialog in Windows Vista and Windows 7, the top of the navigation bar contains a section called Favorite Links (on Windows Vista) or just Favorites (on Windows 7). These items also appear in the Explorer window's Navigation Pane. How do I customize those links? You add or remove them from your Links fol...

Tips/Support