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 ...

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: Click on the desktop, ...

You may have noticed that in Windows Vista Service Pack 1, the Search option on the right hand side of the Start menu has been removed. What happened to it? It's redundant with the Search Box, that thing that has the keyboard focus when you initially open the Start menu. (But if you really want to open Explorer in Search mode, you can ...

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 ...

Sometime last year, we got a report from a customer that whenever he double-clicks an Excel spreadsheet, Excel starts up, but the document isn't loaded. Instead, he gets an error message saying that document could not be found. He has to go to the Open dialog and open the spreadsheet manually. This report was routed to the shell team, since ...

In my rôle as the family technical support department, I get to poke around without really knowing what I'm doing and hope to stumble across a solution. Sometimes I succeed; sometimes I fail. Today, I'm documenting one of my successes in the hope that it might come in handy for you, the technical support department for your family. (If ...

For decades, the Alt+Tab order was the same as the Z-order, but that changes in Windows Vista if you use the enhanced Alt+Tab feature known as Flip, which is on by default on most systems. There are three types of interactive task switching in Windows Vista: Classic Alt+Tab: This is the same one that's been around since Windows 95. ...

Yes, you can write a whereis program in 90 bytes but Windows Server 2003 and Windows Vista both come with a version of WHERE.EXE, so you don't even need the batch file any more.

You may be minding your own business and discover that your clipboard has stopped working. You try to copy something to the clipboard, and it's not there. You try to paste something from the clipboard, and nothing comes out. What's going on? The clipboard is a shared resource. (More specifically, shared among programs that run on the same ...

My colleague David Washington discovered how you can combine the Sidebar slide show gadget with search folders to end up with a slide show that is built out of search results. Pretty neat.