Windows 2000/XP’s “Set program access and defaults” appears to treat the defaults as identical for all users, and doesn’t allow non-Admin users to change it. So while it’s happy that I use Outlook 2003 for my email, I can’t convince it that when my kids logon to the same machine, they’ll use the simpler Outlook Express.
Category Archives: Windows
Snippets
Details of the many editions of Windows Vista have been leaked.
Play Steve Ballmer, but flinging chairs around an office. (via Scoble)
The Beeb and friends have released a bunch of free video content specifically for people to mix up and re-use. But only for people in the UK, dammit.
Out to lunch
You know what really bugs me about Windows and Office sometimes? Sometimes a process will just decided to grab all the CPU and go out to lunch for minutes at a time. I don’t know what it thinks it’s doing — re-indexing its data, re-compiling itself, contacting Mars, something like that. Whatever it is, it’s not paying much attention to what I want it to do.
Outlook just did it. I was in the middle of writing an email. Voom, out to lunch. I managed to save it and exit. And the process kept running till I killed it. WTF? And before you ask, yes, my antivirus and firewall are primed, up-to-date and running. Latest releases, latest service packs of everything. This stuff should be stable.
Annoying, that’s what I call it.
Windows 95 turns 10
Happy birthday, Windows 95 — ten years old today. (Thanks to Malcolm for the reminder)
Looking back, Windows 95 was a big step forward for the Windows world, marking the first modern version, and certainly the first that is still usable today. Windows then trailed MacOS by a long way, and it felt with Win95 that the big gap was made much smaller.
It also seemed to be the first time that an OS got attention from the mainstream consumer, with a humungous advertising campaign. From memory (and rumour) the discussion between Microsoft and the Rolling Stones went something like this:
MS: Can we use “Start me up” for our campaign?
RS: No.
MS: We’ll give you $12 million.
RS: Okay.
Windows 95 finally made Wintel machines usable, in a way that Win3.1 and 3.0 just couldn’t. Maybe it was the long filenames, maybe it was the taskbar and Start menu, maybe it was the Plug’n’Play (though it was very dodgy compared to what we have now), maybe it was the preemptive multitasking (which is still very dodgy).
Under the hood it finally rid us of problems with very limited resources, and it killed the 3rd party TCPIP stack market dead, by including it out of the box. (Despite claims later from Bill Gates during the anti-trust trial that Internet Explorer was integral to Windows, it didn’t include IE unless you bought the separate MS Plus pack.)
It was slow, it was buggy, it trailed Apple by five years, it crashed after 49.7 days of uptime. But it was a great leap forwards.
PS. Thanks to an open-source x86 emulator, Win95 can now run on a Playstation Portable.
Patches for Win2K and WP
If you’ve been holding off patching your Windows 2000 boxes with the latest security updates, do it now, because the Zotob worm is spreading fast. Thankfully it only affects Win2K, and anybody who’s already patched with MS05-039 is already protected.
Also new this week is WordPress 1.5.2. I’ve used WP for a while now, but am now dabbling with it for a company site… it’s increasingly impressive, especially for CMS/Non-dated pages work.
PS: According to a report, car-maker General Motors Holden has lost A$6 million in car production due to the Zotob worm. Other major companies have also been hit.
Moving My Documents
George Skarbek’s column in The Age today features a question from someone pondering moving My Documents. George replies that it involves a bunch of registry fiddling, and that it’s so complicated you can’t do it.
Ummm actually, just right-click on it, go to Properties, and you’ll see a Move button. Click, choose the directory, and it does it. Easy.
Note that it doesn’t shift the other user settings (which are in the parent directory of My Documents).
Longhorn == Windows Vista
Just interrupting my lunchtime to mention that the hot rumour around the place is that the next version of Windows (Longhorn) will be called Windows Vista. Apparently this will be announced on Friday morning US time. Until then, Scoble’s keeping shtum.
Microsoft has registered windowsvista.us, and someone anonymous registered windowsvista.com and .net on the same day.
So, maybe they’re switching from acronyms (ME, XP) and numbers (98, 2000) to more Apple-esque words (Tiger)?
What’s less known is the shipping date and feature set. Not to mention whether or not it’ll be a compelling upgrade. (Hey, it took me until two months ago to get onto Windows XP.)
Pre-emptive, my arse
Ten years after Windows 95 supposedly (but not really) introduced multitasking to the Windows world, it still doesn’t live up to the expectations of users. Even my new WinXP 3Ghz machine takes time out every so often to… well, I don’t know what it’s doing to be honest. I’m clicking on the window I want to use, and it’s gone out to lunch.
What the OS should be doing is paying more attention to what the user’s trying to do. If I’ve finished editing my document, close Word and click back to my email to read what the latest is, I don’t care that Word is still churning up CPU and disk trying to save and shut down. If I’m writing out my movie file after some editing, I don’t want to sit watching the progress bar for it, I want to read the damn email.
You hear that, Windows? I’m the user. I’m in charge. Do what I want. Listen to me.
A buncha stuff
I don’t normally link to the excellent DailyWTF, because it’s full of good stuff, I’d be linking every day. But yesterday’s picture of the server room with a fishbowl to catch the airconditioner water outlet is an absolute classic. (Make sure you read the article as well as look at the picture.)
Classical music labels have criticised the BBC for offering Beethoven’s symphonies as a free download. This strikes me as a tad narrowminded. I’d imagine there’d be a number of people out there who might otherwise not be interested in classical music who might listen to these then go out looking for more to buy. (via Dave Winer)
Microsoft are now offering free evaluation sessions in their products, making use of their Virtual PC technology so you just try things out on a remote session via your browser and Citrix Java client.
New version of Firefox (1.0.5) is available, fixing some vulnerabilities.
Frontpage Express lives on
Want a cheap (free) and cheerful web page editor for Windows? Frontpage Express doesn’t handle niceties such as CSS, but it will do basic page editing, including things the latest versions of Word and Excel make a hash of, such as tables. It also doesn’t have the nasty hooks into Frontpage servers that the old full versions of FP had.
Originally it was bundled with IE4 and 5. It’s not officially available for download anymore, but Google can find it for you.
Win2K SP4 and a bit
For those of you still using it (I certainly am on one of my machines) Windows 2000 SP four-and-a-bit is out. I’m not totally convinced they couldn’t have just slapped an SP5 together, but oh well, there you go.
The amazing vanishing files
When you open an attachment in Outlook 2003, it saves it into a temporary directory then shells the appropriate program to open it. If you then do a Save As from that program, it defaults to that directory, which appears to be something like this:
c:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\OLK85\
A colleague of mine “lost” a bunch of files into there. Try and browse there through Windows Explorer, and you can’t find it. In fact you can get locked out of it even from the application Save As, if you go to the parent directory. The only way to get back in is to type the path manually, or search for the OLK85 directory on the filesystem.
To further confuse things, in a completely different directory:
C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\Microsoft\Office\Recent\
…are shortcuts for all those files in the OLK directory, which are back where we started:
Confused? I am.
The default temp directory is also in that general neighbourhood by the way, and deserves a cleanout every so often.
C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Local Settings\Temp\
A quick look in mine for files more than a week old found 557 files taking 272Mb, as well as 38 directories with another 316Mb. Apart from a Temporary Internet Files directory in there, it all went happily to the recycle bin, and thence to Silicon Heaven.