Showing results for Tips/Support - The Old New Thing

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...

I had another undeletable Outlook folder, and all my tricks for cajoling Outlook into letting me delete it failed. I already deleted all the items in it, emptied it of offline items, deleted all the failures from my Sync Issues folder, but still I couldn't delete the folder. But I came up with a new trick. I moved the folder out of its normal lo...

You already know how to do this, you just don't realize it. How do you find files with an "x" in their name? That's right, you use . Now you just have to change that x to a space. And since spaces are command line delimiters, you need to quote the sequence so it gets treated as a single parameter rather than two "*" parameters: Stick in a ...

A placebo setting that has been getting a lot of play in recent years is that of QoS bandwidth reservation. The setting in question sets a maximum amount of bandwidth that can be reserved for QoS. I guess one thing people forgot to notice is the word "maximum". It doesn't set the amount of reserved bandwidth, just the maximum. Changing the value...

To connect to the Microsoft corporate network from home, employees need to use smartcard authentication. But, somewhat paradoxically, you do better if you remove the smart card. A colleague of mine tipped me off to this. To initiate the connection, you have to insert the smart card and provide the smart card password. Then the system connects to ...

You can sometimes narrow down the source of a problem just by looking at the screen and moving the mouse. When you move the mouse, the cursor on the screen moves to match. This work is done in the window manager in kernel mode. The mouse hardware notifies the window manager, "Hey, I moved left twenty units." The window manager takes this value, ac...

This is sort of the reverse of Why is my CPU usage hovering at 50%?, but the answer is the same. When I run a CPU-intensive task, the CPU percentage used by that process never goes above 50%, and the rest is reported as idle. Is there some setting that I set inadvertently which is preventing the program from using more than half of the CPU? My ...

Into Windows Media Player (version 9 if you're keeping score at home), I type the URL of an MP3 file (poor man's podcast) and get the error message "The download of the specified resource has failed." On this dialog there two buttons: Close and Web Help. Close closes the error dialog, of course. Web Help does nothing. Turns out the real prob...

When you are connected to a workstation via Remote Desktop, the "Turn Off Computer" option changes to "Disconnect". But what if you really want to turn off the computer, hibernate it, or put it on stand-by? Note: These tips work on Windows XP, but there is no guarantee that they will work in future versions of Windows. One way to do this is ...

The purpose of quotation marks is to allow a character that would normally be interpreted as a delimiter to be included as part of a file name. Most of the time, this delimiter is the space. The function uses a space to separate the program name from its arguments. Most programs separate their command line arguments with a space. But the environm...