The Old New Thing

Tips/Support - The Old New Thing

When you start getting in-page errors on your hard drive, it’s time to go shopping for a new hard drive

December 4, 2008 Dec 4, 2008 12/4/08
Raymond Chen
The describes itself as "The instruction at XXX referenced memory at YYY. The required data was not placed into memory because of an I/O error status of ZZZ." What does this mean? It means that the memory manager needed to read some memory from the disk, but the disk returned an error. (Namely, error ZZZ.) Since it has no way to return an ...

How slow do you have to slow-double-click for it to be a rename?

November 10, 2008 Nov 10, 2008 11/10/08
Raymond Chen
In many parts of the system, you can rename an item by first selecting it, then clicking on its name. The selection step is typically done by clicking on the item, which creates the risk that your second click will be interpreted as a double-click rather than as a rename click. How slow do you have to slow-double-click for it to be a rename...

Disable your wireless network card to speed up VPN’ing

October 15, 2008 Oct 15, 2008 10/15/08
Raymond Chen
As a follow-up to my tip on speeding up connecting via RAS and a SmartCard, I've been told that another trick you can do is to disable your wireless networking card before initiating the VPN connection. Wireless networking cards are a huge attack surface, and the VPN software spends a lot of time trying to secure it. I don't have a wireless...

Why does Task Manager let me kill critical system processes?

October 14, 2008 Oct 14, 2008 10/14/08
Raymond Chen
Because you told it to. If you run Task Manager, highlight a critical system process like Winlogon, click End Task, and confirm, then gosh darn it, you just killed Winlogon, and the system will reboot. (Assuming, of course, that you have sufficient privileges to terminate Winlogon in the first place.) Task Manager in earlier versions of ...

The dangers of setting your double-click speed too short

October 2, 2008 Oct 2, 2008 10/2/08
Raymond Chen
After I noted how the window manager uses the double-click time as a basis for determining how good your reflexes are, people got all excited about reducing the double-click speed to make Windows feel peppier. But be careful not to go overboard. Back in the Windows 95 days, we got a bug from a beta tester that went roughly like this...

How do I change the size of my desktop icons?

September 24, 2008 Sep 24, 2008 09/24/08
Raymond Chen
Occasionally, somebody asks how to change the size of the desktop icons, not because they want to change the size from the default, but rather because they somehow turned into giant marshmallow men and they want to get the default size back. There are two ways to change the size of the desktop icons on Windows Vista: When people get into ...

Why, when you sort by name, doesn’t it actually sort by name?

August 4, 2008 Aug 4, 2008 08/4/08
Raymond Chen
When you right-click on the desktop or in an Explorer window and select "Sort by... Name", why doesn't it actually sort by name? Because "Sort according to the default sort order for the column whose title is... Name" is too long. The default sort order for the first column (whose name is "Name") is to sort by name, mostly. The actual ...