10 May 2022
[microsoft] Ewan Dalton’s Tip o’ the Week … If like me, you spend a lot of time working with Microsoft products you might find some useful tips at this blog from Microsoft.
12 August 2021
[windows] What are the cool tools to install for windows? … Reddit discuss Windows apps. Mine are: Notepad++, 7zip and Irfanview.
27 February 2020
[web] Microsoft Paint rebuilt for the Web … A classic Windows app recreated in Javascript.
15 July 2019
[windows] Why did moving the mouse cursor cause Windows 95 to run more quickly? … Or, How to make programs install faster on Windows 95 – This isn’t very useful these days! ‘For reasons that are not entirely clear, but probably due to performance problems on low end machines, Windows 95 tends to bundle up the messages about I/O completion and doesn’t immediately wake up the application to service them. However, it does wake the application for user input, presumably to keep it feeling responsive, and when the application is awake it will handle any pending I/O messages too. Thus wiggling the mouse causes the application to process I/O messages faster, and install quicker.’
11 May 2018
[tech] Notepad gets a major upgrade, now does Unix line endings … It’s only taken since 1985 to get this feature into Windows! ‘But in the next update to Windows (likely to arrive in October or thereabouts), Notepad will handle Unix and classic MacOS line endings in addition to the Windows kind. This will make the editor much more useful than it currently is. And if you don’t like the idea, there’s a registry setting to make it stick with its traditional behavior.’
8 September 2014
[tech] Who wrote the text for the Ctrl+Alt+Del dialog in Windows 3.1? … another interesting titbit of Windows history from Raymond Chen.
2 August 2014
[tech] Why does Outlook map Ctrl+F to Forward instead of Find, like all right-thinking programs? … ‘And then a bug report came in from a beta tester who wanted Ctrl+F to forward rather than find, because he had become accustomed to that keyboard shortcut from the email program he used before Exchange. That beta tester was…’
5 July 2013
[funny] Windows 95 Tips, Tricks, and Tweaks … Screenshot Showing Typical Windows 95 Desktop Icons:
21 June 2010
[fonts] In Defence of the Comic Sans Font … ‘You see it in the most inappropriate places. I once read a leaflet about irritable bowel syndrome that had been written in Comic Sans. Now that’s just wrong.’ (Holly Combs)
7 May 2009
[windows] Windows Tip: Left Click The Device Removal Notification Icon … another simple Windows tip I can’t believe I’ve never realised. Left Click! Left Click!!! :) ‘…according to the traditional rules for notification icons (and the device removal icon was written back in Windows 95, when the traditional rules were operative), left clicking gives you the simple menu and right clicking gives you the advanced menu. This customer was so accustomed to right-clicking on notification icons that the idea of left-clicking never even occurred to him.’
19 June 2008
[windows] How to Make Windows Vista Less Annoying … many useful tips from Lifehacker. ‘How many times have you been right in the middle of something when Windows prompted you to reboot for updates? Or worse… you were right in the middle of something, stepped away for a bit, and come back to find your computer has restarted itself because Windows Update decided to…’
29 April 2008
[windows] Superior Alternatives to Crappy Windows Software … ‘We’re still so traumatized about RealPlayer’s repeated takeover of our PC back in 2004 we’re seeing a special doctor that’s killing that part of our memory.’
28 February 2008
[windows] Find As You Type for Internet Explorer — great little utility that adds Firefox’s powerful and simple way of finding text in a web document to Microsoft’s web browser.
18 August 2007
[windows] Power replacements for built-in Windows utilities – a useful list (as always) from Lifehacker.
18 June 2007
[tip] Windows Tip: Copy Error Messages Text To The Clipboard — I can’t believe I’ve been using Windows for 17 years and never realised you can do this! 
26 September 2005
[tech] Skyfex Remote Assistant — useful remote desktop viewer for supporting Windows desktops over Broadband connections and behind firewalls. [via Yoz]
22 June 2005
[mp3] Foobar2000 — I use this simple MP3 audio player for Windows every day. Recommended.
9 March 2005
[windows] How secure is your computer? … ‘Windows Service Pack 1, or SP 1, however, was another story. It’s an older version of Windows that was sold in computer stores until a few months ago. SP 1 was attacked 4,857 times. It was infested within 18 minutes by the Blaster and Sasser worms. Within an hour it became a “bot,” or a machine controlled by a remote computer, and began attacking other Windows computers.’
5 October 2004
[tech] GDI Scan Tutorial and how to fix the GDI+ JPEG Vulnerability — nice how-to article on fixing the most recent Windows exploit … ‘At the time of this writing more reports are coming out about tools and sample code to take advantage of this vulnerability. The sooner you run this tool and fix any of the exploitable copies of this DLL on your system, the safer you will be.’
23 July 2004
[windows] Lookout V1.2 — If you use Outlook you need this – fast Google-esque searching of your emails … ”An addin to Outlook to quickly search all of your email, contacts, calendar, and filesystem.’ [via Joel on Software]
8 February 2004
[tech] Why does the Windows Copy Dialog give such Horrible Estimates? — explains why copying files is often vaguely annoying. ‘…the copy dialog is just guessing. It can’t predict the future, but it is forced to try. And at the very beginning of the copy, when there is very little history to go by, the prediction can be really bad.’
23 October 2003
[mp3] Anapod Explorer — nice looking Windows software for Apple’s iPod – which, I admit, I’m really tempted to buy… The Marketing Blurb: ‘…includes full Windows Explorer integration as a device in My Computer, web page interface access to your iPod through a built-in web server, and powerful search and reporting capabilities using a built-in SQL database’ [Related: Apple iTunes for Windows | via 2lmc Spool]
13 August 2003
[windows] Magic Number: 30 Billion — John Dvorak estimates the number of times Windows crashes in a year. ‘…the majority of legacy systems out there run Windows 98 with some Windows 95 holdouts and a few operating on Windows Me. These machines bomb more than XP — that’s for sure. Windows 98 represents about 25 percent of the market at this point. It has to crash 10 to 20 percent more often than XP. I think that when we put all the numbers together, we can estimate that there are a minimum of 30 billion Windows system crashes a year. To give you an idea of how ridiculous that number is, here are few comparisons. Thirty billion is the same as the estimated number of Earth-like planets in the Milky Way … ‘
6 April 2003
[mp3] Winamp 2.90 — lastest version of the best MP3 player for Windows.
13 March 2003
[tech] How to Make Real One Behave Nicely — a software engineer from Real explains how to make the Real One media player install with sensible default settings … ‘First, regarding the well known bad behavior of older players: Yes, we know! and as developers we were embarrassed. But things have changed. Everybody has realized there are very strong negative feelings about this behavior, and we really want to improve. In that respect, the latest RealOne V2 is better than older RealPlayers, and on OS X, it’s downright wonderful. On Windows you still have to do the following, which isn’t too bad, but still could have been better…’
9 October 2002
[games] Solitary Confinement — The inside story behind Solitaire for Windows … ‘Generations of Windows software have come and gone, but Solitaire continues on. How much has Cherry earned for this staple of world computer culture? Nothing. Nothing upfront. No royalties. Zero. How ironic. The richest man in the world (or is he second-richest this week?) got that rich by collecting software royalties, but the actual creator of the most distributed, most used program of all gets none of those royalties passed along to him.’ [via Rodcorp]
22 August 2001
[distraction] Lastest version of Windows. [via Wanderers Weblog]
17 August 2001
23 April 2000
[tech] Microsoft makes another attempt to hide support for DOS in the lastest version of Windows.
18 April 2000
[tech/mp3] I’ve finally got Audiograbber to rip from CD’s on NT. I’ve also started using Lame to encode the MP3’s. Both come highly recommended…
16 April 2000
[MP3] New versions of Winamp and Audiograbber have been released. Download here: Winamp 2.62 and Audiograbber 1.62.
15 April 2000
[funny] Someone’s released the source for Windows 2000! [via random($foo)]
23 March 2000
[tech] Nice overview of why text created on Windows PC’s looks tiny on Macintoshes….