Showing results for Tips/Support - The Old New Thing

With the new Windows Vista Start menu, the keyboard shortcuts have once again been reorganized. You used to be able to hit the Windows key and then type L to call up the Log off menu, and then L again to trigger the logoff. Or you can hit the Windows key and then type I to launch Internet Explorer if you've been so careful to ensure that ...

As we saw when we discussed context menus, holding down the shift key when opening a context menu adds so-called extended verbs to the menu. These are verbs that are less frequently used whose presence would clutter up the menu or pose an attractive nuisance. For example, the "Command Prompt Here" command is an extended command since your typica...

Yes, I know already.

When you call up the file security dialog, you'll see options like "Full Control" and "Read and Execute". That's really nice as friendly names go, but when you're digging into the security descriptor, you may need to know what those permissions really map to when it comes down to bits. First, the summary attributes: If you go to the Advanced vie...

So-called canonical order for ACEs in an access control list places deny ACEs ahead of allow ACEs. Why is this the canonical order? Because it gives results that are sensible. The algorithm for determining whether a user has access to an object protected by an ACL is as follows: let access-still-needed = access-requested for each ACE in t...

To execute a command in each subdirectory of a directory tree from a batch file, you can adapt the following: (If you want to play with this command from the command prompt, then undouble the percent signs.) The option enables various special behaviors of the command. The most important change is that a string in single-quotation marks caus...

On Windows Vista with User Account Control enabled, when you right-click a program and select Run as Administrator, the elevation prompt contains a particular snippet of warning text and a corresponding color-coding. Here are what the four colors mean. You can learn about the philosophy behind UAC in this Channel9 interview. Pre-emptive snarky...

Long Zheng does it again. He follows up his interview with Hamad Darwish with a report on what Hamad has been doing lately, as well as links to high resolution versions of the entire Vista wallpaper photo shoot, including photos that didn't make the final cut.

I promised to talk more about NMI, so here it is. What generates an NMI? What does it mean? The first question is easy to answer but doesn't actually shed much light: Any device can pull the NMI line, and that will generate a non-maskable interrupt. Back in the Windows 95 days, a few really cool people had taken the ball-point pen trick one...

One of my colleagues recently posted the story of the work he did to get laptops to resume quickly. The fun part was implementing the optimizations in the kernel. The not-fun part was finding all the drivers who did bad things and harassing their owners into fixing the bugs. One some laptops, he could get the resume time down to an impressive on...