The Old New Thing

What's the deal with the System Volume Information folder?

November 20, 2003 Nov 20, 2003 11/20/03

Raymond Chen

In the root of every drive is a folder called "System Volume Information". If your drive is NTFS, the permissions on the folder are set so not even administrators can get in there. What's the big secret? The folder contains information that casual interference could cause problems with proper system functioning. Here are some of the things...

How can I tell if I have the 64-bit edition of Windows?

November 19, 2003 Nov 19, 2003 11/19/03

Raymond Chen

Answer: Your wallet is empty. Seriously, there is no way you bought an Itanium by mistake. They are expensive machines: The entry-level workstation available from HP (who co-developed the Itanium with Intel) goes for over $3000 and the entry-level server is over $13,000. And in addition to paying for the computer itself, you probably had to ...

Notepad's geek options require Word Wrap be disabled

November 19, 2003 Nov 19, 2003 11/19/03

Raymond Chen

If you want to use the "Go To" or "Status Bar" options, you have to turn off word warp first. (Word wrap messes with line breaks...

In Explorer, you can right-click the icon in the caption

October 8, 2003 Oct 8, 2003 10/8/03

Raymond Chen

In Explorer, you can right-click the icon in the caption to get the context menu for the folder you are viewing. (Very handy for "Search" or "Command Prompt Here".) Apparently not enough people realize this. In Windows 95, we tried to make it so most icons on the screen did something interesting when you right-clicked them...

What do the text label colors mean for files?

October 2, 2003 Oct 2, 2003 10/2/03

Raymond Chen

Blue means compressed; green means encrypted. This is an example of one of those "come on, it's a tiny, simple feature" requests. Yes, the code to do this isn't particularly complicated, but it adds another element of "Ha ha, I'm going to do something in a way that you will never be able to ...

Why does my Advanced Options dialog say ON and OFF after every option?

October 2, 2003 Oct 2, 2003 10/2/03

Raymond Chen

Because Windows thinks a screenreader is running. If a screenreader is running, then the Advanced Options dialog will add "ON" and "OFF" to the end of each checkbox item so the screenreader program can read the state to a blind user...

You too can dress like Raymond

September 11, 2003 Sep 11, 2003 09/11/03

Raymond Chen

Yes, I'm the Raymond that Kraig Brockschmidt is writing about when he discusses "Dress Like Raymond Day...

Setup could not verify integrity of file

August 31, 2003 Aug 31, 2003 08/31/03

Raymond Chen

When you try to install a patch, you may get the error message "Setup could not verify integrity of file. Make sure the cryptographic service is running." This typically means that the signature catalog has been corrupted. There was a patch to fix this problem, but of course if you haven'...

What are all these files in my C:WINDOWSCSC directory?

August 27, 2003 Aug 27, 2003 08/27/03

Raymond Chen

This is where Windows keeps the files that you have marked for being available offline.  (CSC was the working name for the feature now called Offline Files. It stands for Client-Side Caching...