Microsoft Windows | Technology Tales

Useful keyboard shortcuts for managing the window sizes of Windows applications

9^th June 2008

Maximising and minimising windows is all part and parcel of using window-based user interfaces, so it's nice to know that there are keyboard shortcuts that reduce the need to use your mouse all the time. Here are a few that work on Windows:

Alt+Space+N Minimise

Alt+Space+X Maximise

Alt+Space+R Restore (set to default)

System error codes for Windows

9^th May 2008

Windows system error codes can be indecipherable, so it's useful to have a list. Microsoft has one on its Microsoft Learn website that may help. However, the decodes may not as explicit as I would like, but they're better than nothing when you don't get anything other than the number.

A year in the making…

17^th January 2008

It was a year ago that I set this blog on the go. Then, I was exploring the possibilities offered by WordPress.com. After some months, I decided that I wanted to make my own decisions rather than have them, so I went independent in June. Between those dates, some big launches took my attention: Windows Vista, Office 2007 & CS3 come to mind. All the while, my experience of UNIX, Oracle and other such matters kept growing more and more. In the latter half of the year, I finally made the leap from Windows to Linux on the home computing front, a decision that taught me a lot and one that I don't regret. Other subjects featured from time to time as well; my musings on web development and blogging made their appearance too. 2007 was a packed year on the technology front, and 2008 is only just getting under way. There's a Vista laptop, and I am already picking up ideas for posts, though I am not going to force them out like I might have tried to do last year. 2008 may be a spot more leisurely, but I hope that it's just as interesting.

When desktop.ini files appear on the Windows Vista desktop...

14^th January 2008

Being an experienced computer user, I set Windows Explorer to display hidden files when using a Windows PC. However, on my Vista-empowered laptop, that causes two desktop.ini files to appear on the desktop, one for all users and one for my user account. And displaying hidden files does not seem to be something that you can do on a folder by folder basis. With XP, this did not cause hidden files to appear on your desktop like this, so the behaviour could be seen as a step backwards.

A spot of googling exposed me to some trite suggestions regarding re-hiding files again, but deleting them seems to be the only way out. Despite the dire warnings being issued, there didn't seem to be any untoward problems caused by my actions. For now, I'll see if they stay away, yet episodes like this do make me wonder if it is time for Microsoft to stop treating us like idiots and give us things that work the way in which we want them to function. Well, I'm glad that Linux is the linchpin of my home computing world...

A pleasant surprise…

4^th December 2007

Yesterday, when taking the screen grab for my post on Quanta Plus, I did the Alt + Print Screen shuffle as usual. However, when I did so, I was greeted with a dialogue box asking me where I wanted to store the PNG file that was to be produced and what I wanted to call it. The operation was as swish as that. On Windows, the screenshot gets stuffed into the clipboard for you to extricate it with your graphics editor of choice, so this was an interesting surprise. It's the sort of thing that can make a good impression, and it is striking that Linux seems to be ahead of Windows on this one. Who said Linux was less than user-friendly?

Saving screenshots in Ubuntu

Do I still need serial numbers?

19^th November 2007

My spot of bad luck with Windows in August highlighted the importance of hanging on to serial numbers for software that I had purchased over the internet and downloaded. Though I could get at the ones that I needed, they were retained in a motley mix of text files and emails; one even was rediscovered by pottering back to the website of the purveyor. While the security of the installation files themselves was another matter of some concern, I was rather more organised in that regard. Both of these are things that need checking before Windows falls to pieces on you and needs to be reinstalled. Of course, human nature, being what it is, means that we often find ourselves picking up the pieces after a calamity has struck when a spot of planning would have made things that bit easier.

Linux does make life easier on this front: commercial applications are anything but the dominant force that they are in the world of Windows. That means that serial numbers are few and far between, and I only need the one for VMware Workstation. The mention of VMware brings me to my retention of Windows, so knowing where serial numbers are located remains a good idea. Even so, I cloned my Windows VM so that any Windows restoration following a destructive crash should be a quicker affair. Now that I am a Linux user, Windows crashes should not encroach as much on my home computing any more and Linux should be more stable anyway...

Repairing Windows XP

21^st October 2007

I have been having an accident-prone time of it with Windows XP recently, and have had plenty of reason to be thankful for the ability to perform a repair installation. Here are the steps:

Pop the installation disk into your PC's DVD drive and reboot the PC.
If you have your PC set it up to boot from DVD's in its BIOS, then you at least will have the option to do this. You may find that this happens by default, but I needed to tell it to do the deed.
Select normal installation from the first menu that is presented to you by the installer.
Accept the licence agreement.
Press R at the next menu and that'll repair the installation.
Follow all the menus from there on; it'll be all the usual stuff from here on in, and there should be no need to reactivate Windows or reinstall all of your other software afterwards.

There is a repair option on the first screen (step 3 above) but this takes you into the dark recesses of the command line and isn't what I was needing. I do have to say that they do leave the required option late on in the installation process and that assumes on users having a risk taking streak in them, something that definitely does not apply to everyone. If your boot.ini file is not well, you may find yourself needing to do the full installation and that wipes the slate clean for you, extending the recovery process.

Troubleshooting missing HAL.DLL and boot configuration issues in Windows XP

2^nd August 2007

My PC is very poorly at the moment and Windows XP re-installation is the prescribed course of action. However, I have getting errors reporting missing or damaged HAL.DLL at the first reboot of the system during installation. Because I thought that there might be hard disk confusion, I unplugged all but the Windows boot drive. That only gave me an error about hard drives not being set up properly. Thankfully, a quick outing on Google turned up a few ideas. However, I should really have started with Microsoft, since they have an article on the problem. About.com has also got something to offer on the subject and seems to be a good resource on installing XP to boot: I had forgotten how to do a repair installation and couldn't find the place in the installation menus. In any event, a complete refresh should be a good thing in the long run, even if it will be a very disruptive process. While I did consider moving to Vista at that point, bringing XP back online seemed the quickest route to getting things back together again. Strangely, I feel like a fish out of water right now, but that'll soon change...

Update: It was, in fact, my boot.ini that was causing this and replacement of the existing contents with defaults resolved the problem...

Windows Sysinternals

5^th June 2007

In an earlier post, I wondered about command line management of Windows processes. Well, I have since located the sort of tools that I was after as part of the Windows Sysinternals toolkit. It began as an independent endeavour and continued as such until Microsoft acquired them in 2006. You can find out more about the process utilities here, and the whole Sysinternals suite can be downloaded in a single package.

Is Windows 2000 support finished?

30^th March 2007

At work, we still use Windows 2000 on our desktop and laptop PC’s. This may (or may not) surprise you, but the XP upgrade seems to have been thought a premature move, only for Vista to turn up later than might have been expected. Now that Microsoft is winding down support for Windows 2000, thoughts have started to turn to a Vista upgrade, but the realisation soon dawned that a move to Vista was a major one, and it now looks as if we will be on Windows 2000 for a little while yet, until 2008 at least.

I, too, have Windows 2000 lurking around at home as a testing platform, not a work copy I hasten to add, and software vendors increasingly are not supporting the operating system any more. Symantec is one of these, with the 2006 versions of its products being the last ones to support Windows 2000. Initially, I was left with the impression that Kaspersky was the same, but this does not seem to be the case. While the open-source community can continue their supply of productivity applications such as OpenOffice, the GIMP and so on, it is the security side that is of most concern as regards the future of Windows 2000. That said, its successors are not the prime targets for cracking, but shared code could mean that it falls foul of the same exploits.

I have yet to notice it with the hardware that I am using, but hardware advances may yet put paid to Windows 2000 like they did to members of the Windows 9x line, especially when you consider that the operating system dates from 1999. Then again, you may find that you don’t need the latest hardware, so this might not affect you. This is not all that unreasonable given that the pace of technological progress is less frenzied these days than it was in the nineties, when Windows 95 was more or less out of date by the turn of the millennium. Having the gold OEM version of Windows 95 as the basis for a Windows 9x upgrade treadmill meant that my move into the world of NT-based operating systems was a clean break with a full version of my new operating system and not its upgrade edition.

Nevertheless, there remains a feeling that Windows 2000 is being cut off prematurely and that it could last a while longer with a bit of support, even if there is a feel of the late nineties about the thing. After all, Windows 2000 probably still supports a lot of what people want to do and without the Big Brother tendencies of Vista too.

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