The Old New Thing

Tips/Support - The Old New Thing

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 ...

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 ...

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 those little overlay icons?

August 27, 2003 Aug 27, 2003 08/27/03
Raymond Chen
Windows XP ships with a number of icon overlays. A small arrow. Everybody knows this one: It's the shortcut overlay. A hand, palm up. This is the "sharing" overlay. A folder with this overlay is the root of a file share. A ...