The Old New Thing

Why, when you sort by name, doesn’t it actually sort by name?

When you right-click on the desktop or in an Explorer window and select "Sort by... Name", why doesn't it actually sort by name? Because "Sort according to the default sort order for the column whose title is... Name" is too long. The default sort order for the first column (whose name is "Name") is to sort by name, mostly. The actual ...

Windows could not properly load the XYZ keyboard layout

In my rôle as the family technical support department, I get to poke around without really knowing what I'm doing and hope to stumble across a solution. Sometimes I succeed; sometimes I fail. Today, I'm documenting one of my successes in the hope that it might come in handy for you, the technical support department for your family. (...

Windows Vista changed the Alt+Tab order slightly

For decades, the Alt+Tab order was the same as the Z-order, but that changes in Windows Vista if you use the enhanced Alt+Tab feature known as Flip, which is on by default on most systems. There are three types of interactive task switching in Windows Vista: Classic Alt+Tab continues to show the icons in Z-order order, but the developer ...

Why has my clipboard stopped working?

You may be minding your own business and discover that your clipboard has stopped working. You try to copy something to the clipboard, and it's not there. You try to paste something from the clipboard, and nothing comes out. What's going on? The clipboard is a shared resource. (More specifically, shared among programs that run on the same ...

One-line batch script to delete empty directories

You don't need a whole 260KB program to do it. This batch file does the trick just fine: I call it . This is the long-forgotten follow-up to Performing an operation in each subdirectory of a directory tree from batch. We're using the same technique as in that article, but pumping the result through "" to reverse the order of the ...