Twenty five years ago today, Microsoft released Windows 95. It was undoubtedly a technical leap forward, but its biggest, most lasting impacts are about how it...

Update: Since this post got a lot more readers than I expected, it’s become clear to me that the title was unintentionally vague. I thought it’s amazing that...

Another new version of Windows is nearly upon us, as Microsoft will release Windows 7 later this year. Vista was greeted with probably a few too many jeers, wh...

If you’d like to open up the package for your licensed copy of Microsoft Windows Vista, you only need to follow these three helpfully-illustrated steps ....

WordWeb, a dictionary and thesaurus program for Windows, has a startling and interesting clause in its licensing terms : You may use the program free of...

Phew! A warm welcome to my regular readers, now that I’ve had the misfortune of being visited by the worst of the rest of the web’s audience. I should have kno...

Windows Vista’s astoundingly long beta period is winding down (they just sent out the “what did you think of the beta?” surveys to testers), which means a whol...

Sometimes I just can’t resist amusing myself when talking in a public forum. My wife recently got a MacBook, which marks the first time I’ve ever had a Mac in...

Three years ago, Dan Geer led a team of security experts in authoring a paper about the threat of a software monoculture. The paper, entitled “ CyberInsecurity...

One of the interesting things about being a serious Windows user is that very little attention is paid to efficient users of Windows, and that we suffer from a...

One of the most obscure keyboard shortcuts in Windows, Shift+F8 has magical powers. Thanks to Andre for this completely useless pointer....

One of the most recurrently popular posts I’ve written was on Real Alternative , an application that is infinitely more tolerable than Real’s official player...

Neowin, which is probably the most popular site for Windows groupies, leaked screenshots of MSN Desktop Search , as is their wont. What surprises me is that I...

I’ll pay $100 to the first person who figures out how to make SubEthaEdit (worst name ever! I still call it Hydra) and OneNote service pack ‘s document-edit...

Most of the people I know are geeks, and some large number of geeks are obsessive to one degree or another. (This can be verified by anyone who’s ever mumbled...

One of the more interesting Windows applications to pop up in the past few months is Real Alternative, which you can check out at this rather disorganized pag...

I’d been playing with a redesign concept a few months ago that I never got around to finishing, so I thought I’d put it up for comments from all of you, and...

Dear Microsoft: What the fuck? Ten years ago, Windows 3.1 was the current version of Windows. I’d been using Windows for the better part of a decade then, an...

If you take a look at the developer documentation that’s just becoming available with the release of the first beta, you’ll see that Office 11 supports XSL tr...

Dear nested P tag with a class that has a negative margin style that screws up the way DIVs appear in Internet Explorer 6 on Windows: I would like that half...

Speaking of missed opportunities in programming interfaces, why don’t mainstream Windows applications support usage metering at the function level? Meaning, wh...

Microsoft’s been promoting its Tablet PC s for about a year now. Despite all the claims, they’re more evolutionary than revolutionary, of course. But that’s t...

K-Meleon caught my eye a long time ago, but it looks like it hasn’t been updated since forever. If they’d just update it now that Mozilla 1.0 is released, I...

One of the great things about working with true Cult of the Dogcow Mac afficionados is that they’re so brainwashed that they don’t even realize how amusing the...

Shannon talks about multiple-AIM-window conversation confusion , and mentions that she actually talked about the person she was talking to . I gotta say, I...

If I had an Xpache game disk, I would buy an Xbox . Especially since PHP is so much more stable on Windows platforms these days. So, somebody get off yo...

For dorks only: a nearly comprehensive list of the services that are installed by default in Windows 2000. (And, for the most part, in Windows XP as well.) G...

Just for Leia , NT4 and Windows 2000 users should find Microsoft Personal Security Advisor quite useful....

Why can’t I point at the volume control in the Windows system tray on the taskbar and use my mouse scroll wheel to turn the volume up and down? I’m just wond...

As I’m setting up my new workstation at work, I’m realizing all the little utilities that I can’t do without when doing development work. Case in point, this g...

Note to IE5/Windows users: I know about the scrolling weirdness on this page. I’ve finally got access to a machine with IE5, so I should have it fixed posthast...

For those who thought it would never be done: Migrating Microsoft Hotmail from FreeBSD to Windows 2000 Technical Case Study . I’m surprised we didn’t hear mor...

Did you know you need the IIS MetaBase Editing Utility ? Internet Information Server on NT 4 or Windows 2000 stores all of its configuration info in a little...

Just found an interesting program called PHPCompiler that purports to make Windows executables out of PHP code. Or, more accurately, it’s a bunch of support...

A nice table listing how the Windows 2000 command-line differs from MS-DOS . Includes cool stuff like the & which you can use to separate multiple command...

From Yahoo! Music : Techno whiz Moby is holed up in his Manhattan, N.Y., apartment, teaching himself Pro-Tools and “obsessively writing stuff for the next...

Interesting recognition of a market niche: Microsoft has a page called Windows 2000 for Tech Enthusiasts . I guess that’s me. I’m a geek....

Better granularity over the installation and removal of Windows 2000 Components . Especially useful on Win2K servers....

I’m not surprised they say they’ve found security holes in Windows Media Player skins . I did one of the first skins Microsoft commissioned for Player 7, and...

Phew! Man, I haven’t fought that hard since I tried to download the basic version of RealPlayer instead of Plus…...

Meg noticed more popups too , which I had mentioned seeing a couple of weeks ago . Funny thing is, there are pretty easy ways to take care of these, although...

Just for my own future reference, here’s how to make a bootable Windows 2000 CD , and of course before you do that, you’ll want to slipstream the service pac...

I’m still obsessing over NTFS mount points and junctions too. I’m working on something new, but until then, here’s how to mount your CD-ROM onto an NTFS Jun...

Monstrously large article on the Registry in Win2K, with lots of info on using it to customize file handling. Gives me a bunch of ideas for how to tweak my m...

Hadn’t heard about this anywhere else, but the Windows Whistler beta apparently offers a feature called Remote Assistance . It seems similar to Network Assist...

sysinternals has a great tool that brings one of the few things I love about Unix to Windows 2000. It’s called Junction, and it acts like ln to create sym...

Microsoft finally updated Tweak UI for Windows Me and 2000. Best feature: It lets your customize the places bar in the file dialogs. I’m so glad I don’t...

Kinda cool: I made the skin featured on the Faith Hill page at WindowsMedia.com....

Microsoft turned 25 yesterday. I turn 25 today....

Going to quote Ev again today, with his comment: Balance controls on stereos, car radios, walkmans, mp3 players, etc. usually have far more prevalence th...

I’m half-asleep, so forgive me if this is incoherent, but the way to find out if people prefer open source software or free (as in beer) software, is to co...

Wish I’d have seen this info before about running ZoneAlarm with Windows 2000 SP1 before I tore my hair out figuring how my network connection died… Oh, an...

While criticizing Microsoft for a lack of innovation is certainly mostly legitimate, think of how cleverly they implemented the progression from DOS/Windows 3....

I just found out Phil Katz died on April 14 . Those of you who go back with computers to the days of DOS probably know him better by his initials PK, as in P...

Is it too geeky, even for a weblog, for me to say that I think the weblog map is beautiful ? And, speaking of geeky, Q and Lake Effect readers will be...

Lookit! I’m here . (Scroll down a little.)...

While talking to Damien I remarked that the only way Apple could jeopardize its recent revitalization would be to compromise the usability and elegant desi...

From ZDNet : Microsoft to include Hindi in Win2000 Microsoft Corp.’s (Nasdaq: MSFT) Windows 2000 software platform, due to be launched in February, will...

Shouldn’t the progress bars be resizable in modern operating systems? I was at a client and wanted to see how far along a certain task was, but I was acros...

In the immortal words of Diana Ross, " I’m Coming Out, I Want the World to Know "”. And what exactly is my secret? I am the guy Microsoft makes all t...

Perhaps one of the best examples of accomodating user needs is the "Boss Screen", a rather clever and amusing tradition which dates back at least t...