Showing tag results for Tips/Support

When you open the Start menu and type into the search box, sometimes the first search result is autoselected (so you just have to hit Enter), whereas sometimes See more results is autoselected. Is there a method to this madness? If an item is found in the Programs and Control Panel sections, then the first such is autoselected. Otherwise, the def...

A customer wanted to prevent users from copying files to certain locations, and they did it by hooking functions like and failing the operation if the parameters were not to its liking. The customer found that the hooks stopped working in Windows Vista because Explorer in Windows Vista uses the new COM interface instead of using the old function...

You may find yourself in a situation where Windows takes longer than your specified screen saver idle timeout to start the screen saver. First of all, there are ways for programs to block the screen saver entirely. Calling , is how a program says, "Even though there is no mouse or keyboard input, the screen is indeed in use, so don't blank it or s...

When you set your Explorer to Details view, it can become tricky to drop an item onto the window background (in order to move it into the folder) because Details view sets full row select (starting in Windows Vista). This helps users of tablets and touch screens, because it increases the size of the target when dragging and dropping into a fol...

alexx is looking for a keyboard-only equivalent to the ctrl+click trick I mentioned a few days ago. Not as quick, but it still works. And it works even if the windows you want got converted into a group. Of course, on Windows 7, you can use the Win+Left and Win+Right hotkeys. (Users with multiple monitors can couple this with Win+Shift+...

Grab it far from the edge you care about.

Commenter n/a posted a laundry list of feature requests. I'm not going to address all of them here (though I inadvertently addressed one of them a while ago). But today I'm going to address request number two, "A simple switch to create two windows, one alongside the other, vertically split." That feature has been around since Windows 95, p...

A customer reported that on Windows Vista, if you hold down the shift key and repeatedly click the View button in the command bar of an Explorer window, you will eventually reach a state where all the labels under the icons have disappeared! Where did they go, and how do I get them back? Congratulations, you stumbled across a rogue feature. One ...

Sometime last year a customer wanted to know why the screen goes black when the system automatically hibernates due to critically low battery power. Shouldn't there be some sort of feedback to tell the user, "Hey, like, I'm hibernating, don't worry"? The power management folks explained that they turn off the screen for a reason: They're trying t...

When Larry Osterman mentioned News Flash: Spaces are legal characters in both filenames and passwords, I was reminded of my own little experiment with passwords and spaces. Over a decade ago, I tried using spaces in my password, and they were accepted, but I ran into a different problem: Brand name bias. The password system accepted "Coke adds ...