Showing tag results for Tips/Support

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...

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 ...