The Old New Thing

Tips/Support - The Old New Thing

A shortcut to the Run dialog

November 24, 2003 Nov 24, 2003 11/24/03
Raymond Chen
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...

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 ...

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 ...