Showing results for Tips/Support - The Old New Thing

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...

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.)

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 instal...

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.

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 figure ...

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.

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

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't bee...

I get called on frequently to do troubleshooting, so I figure I'd share some entries from my private bag of tricks.  (And there are some remarks for programmers hidden here too.) Problem 1. A folder like opens each time you log on. Reason: Your system contains two ...