Ah, welcome to "Tiny Footprint Mode". This mode exists for the ultrageeks who want to put a tiny little CPU meter in the corner of the screen. To go back to normal mode, just double-click a blank space in the border. This is one of those geek features that has created more problems than it solved. Sure, the geeks get their cute little CP...
In a comment to yesterday's entry, someone asked about the customized icon that appears in the address bar... sometimes. There's actually method to the madness. I was going to write about it later, but the comment (and misinformed answers) prompted me to move it up the schedule a bit. (The originally-scheduled topic for today - the history...
Okay, I'm about to reveal one of the tricks of Product Support. Sometimes you're on the phone with somebody and you suspect that the problem is something as simple as forgetting to plug it in, or that the cable was plugged into the wrong port. This is easy to do with those PS/2 connectors that fit both a keyboard and a mouse plug, or with ne...
Lockergnome tipped people off to this page which talks (among other things) about adding "Copy To" to the context menu. I considered adding this tweak to Tweak UI but ultimately decided against. Here's why: The "Copy to Folder" and "Move to Folder" options weren't designed to be on the context menu. They were only meant to be placed in Explorer's...
Sometimes you'll find a blank taskbar button that goes away when you click on it. What's the deal with that? There are some basic rules on which windows go into the taskbar. In short: (Though the ITaskbarList interface muddies this up a bit.) When a taskbar-eligible window becomes visible, the taskbar creates a button for it. When a taskbar-elig...
The programs in the startup group run in an unspecified order. Some people think they execute in the order they were created. Then you upgraded from Windows 98 to Windows 2000 and found that didn't work any more. Other people think they execute in alphabetical order. Then you installed a Windows XP multilingual user interface language pack and fo...
Am I the only one who find these icons bizarro?
Here's a little script that opens the Run dialog. You can save it as "Run.js" and double-click it. The advantage of this approach over various others people have come up with is that this one is actually documented. (And therefore is less likely to break in the next version of the operating system.)
The command prompt is a drop target: Dropping a file onto it inserts the filename.
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 kept...
