Showing tag results for Tips/Support

The describes itself as "The instruction at XXX referenced memory at YYY. The required data was not placed into memory because of an I/O error status of ZZZ." What does this mean? It means that the memory manager needed to read some memory from the disk, but the disk returned an error. (Namely, error ZZZ.) Since it has no way to return an error ...

In many parts of the system, you can rename an item by first selecting it, then clicking on its name. The selection step is typically done by clicking on the item, which creates the risk that your second click will be interpreted as a double-click rather than as a rename click. How slow do you have to slow-double-click for it to be a rename? Slow...

"I don't know what happened, but now when I open the Run dialog on my Windows Vista machine by typing Windows+R, there is a shield under the edit box that says This task will be created with administrative privileges. What's going on?" One my colleagues used psychic powers to solve this problem: "I imagine that you manually killed Explorer, and t...

As a follow-up to my tip on speeding up connecting via RAS and a SmartCard, I've been told that another trick you can do is to disable your wireless networking card before initiating the VPN connection. Wireless networking cards are a huge attack surface, and the VPN software spends a lot of time trying to secure it. I don't have a wireless netw...

Because you told it to. If you run Task Manager, highlight a critical system process like Winlogon, click End Task, and confirm, then gosh darn it, you just killed Winlogon, and the system will reboot. (Assuming, of course, that you have sufficient privileges to terminate Winlogon in the first place.) Task Manager in earlier versions of Window...

Windows Vista displays a big scary dialog when the hard drive's on-board circuitry reports that the hardware is starting to fail. Yet if you go to the Disk Management snap-in, it reports that the drive is Healthy. What's up with that? The Disk Management snap-in is interested in the logical structure of the drive. Is the partition table consiste...

After I noted how the window manager uses the double-click time as a basis for determining how good your reflexes are, people got all excited about reducing the double-click speed to make Windows feel peppier. But be careful not to go overboard. Back in the Windows 95 days, we got a bug from a beta tester that went roughly like this: T...

Occasionally, somebody asks how to change the size of the desktop icons, not because they want to change the size from the default, but rather because they somehow turned into giant marshmallow men and they want to get the default size back. There are two ways to change the size of the desktop icons on Windows Vista: When people get into this s...

You may have noticed that in Windows Vista Service Pack 1, the Search option on the right hand side of the Start menu has been removed. What happened to it? It's redundant with the Search Box, that thing that has the keyboard focus when you initially open the Start menu. (But if you really want to open Explorer in Search mode, you can still...

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 sort or...