Showing results for Tips/Support - The Old New Thing

Partly as a convenience, but partly to work around buggy hardware. The developer responsible for CD burning explained it to me. Most CD drives cache information about the disc in their internal memory to improve performance. However, some drives have a bug where they fail to update the cache after the CD has been written to. As a result, you can w...

It didn't forget them; it's just double-checking with you. The developer responsible for CD autoplay in Windows XP SP2 explained it to me. There were two problems with the way Windows XP handled CD autoplay. First, when you installed a new program that included CD autoplay capability, many users didn't know where in ...

Some people have noticed that certain programs cause the Add or Remove Programs control panel to create an enormous amount of blank space. What's going on? These are programs that have bad custom uninstall icon registrations. If you go to the registry key , you'll find a list of programs that have registered for appearing in the Add or Remove...

This is one of those poorly-worded options. In the Start menu configuration dialog, you can choose to uncheck "Enable dragging and dropping". This setting disables drag/drop but also disables right-click context menus. The connection between the two is explained in the Group Policy Editor, but is unfortunately oversimplified in the general-public ...

Some support people have asked me why the "About" dialog seems to be kind of schizophrenic as to whether a machine has Windows XP SP1 or SP2. About Windows Microsoft® Windows Version 5.1 (Build 2600.xpsp2.040919-1003 : Service Pack 1) Copyright© 1981-2001 Microsoft Corporation Why does the version string say "xpsp2" and ...

Sometimes people go to great lengths to get information which is available in a much simpler way. We saw it a few days ago when we found a 200+-line C# program that could be replaced with a 90-byte batch file. Here's another example of a rather roundabout way of capturing the current directory from a batch file. The easy way is to use the pse...

By default, the Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) which is used by Automatic Updates will use idle network bandwidth for downloading updates. This is normally not a problem. One case where it can be a problem is you have a large LAN that shares a single DSL connection. BITS doesn't see that that DSL connection is shared. Consequently,...

If you have a file or directory that does not have a last-modified date, you may find that it causes Explorer to sort very strangely. (How do you get a file or directory with no last-modifiied date? It's hard to do; you need the help of an external file system.) Why is this? As we learned earlier, a sort comparison function must impose a total or...

Sometimes people try too hard. You can download a C# program to look for a file on your PATH, or you can use a 90-character batch file:

Sometimes people try too hard. You can download a C# program to look for a file on your PATH, or you can use a 90-character batch file: