Showing tag results for Tips/Support

If you are running Windows Server 2003, you owe it to yourself to enable the Volume Shadow Copy service. What this service does is periodically (according to a schedule you set) capture a snapshot of the files you specify so they can be recovered later. The copies are lazy: If a file doesn't change between snapshots, a new copy isn't made. Up to 6...

One shows things that might be, the other shows things that were. Both of them try to help you type something, but they operate differently (and look confusingly similar). Let's take the second case first. Dropdown history, like you see in the Run dialog, common file dialogs, and the Internet Explorer address bar. The cue for dropdown history is a...

The list of programs on the left hand side of the Start menu is really two lists. (You can see the separator line between them.) The top list is the so-called "pin list". This is the list of programs you picked to be "locked" to the top of the Start menu. You can "pin" a program by right-clicking it and selecting "Pin to Start menu", or you can j...

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,...