Windows Quirks
The Windows operating system has some interesting unintuitive behaviours that you may or may not be aware of. Here is a list of them, in no particular order.
Uneven display of clock ticking-
Control Panel clock display does not tick evenly. It ticks 4 seconds quickly, then 1 second slowly. I think it’s because the clock is redrawn at 800 ms intervals, instead of at 1000 ms intervals.
Workaround: Use another clock or write your own if the jitter causes problems.
No man’s landIn the Luna theme, there is a dead zone between the minimize and maximize/restore buttons. You can move the window by dragging this area of the title bar, but you cannot invoke the context menu. This area is 2 pixels wide. There is, however, no dead zone between the maximize/restore and close buttons.
- Disappearing context menus
Usually, open menus don’t disappear if you don’t click or type (but you can still move the mouse around). In Explorer, the context menu for files sometimes disappears without any action. This happens if it takes a very long time to load the context menu (often because the number of files is very large or the system is lagging). Workaround: Use the functionally identical "File" menu on the menu bar.
Notepad’s pickiness with line separators-
While almost every other application accepts Unix and Mac line separators, Notepad doesn’t.
Workarounds: Open the file in Wordpad and save it immediately. Then open it in Notepad. Or use an editor like Notepad2.
- Taking a long time to open a folder
Starting a connection to a network share takes about 10 seconds. Even web pages from the Internet usually load faster than this.
- No chance to log in to shared printer
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If you haven’t logged in, using a network printer will fail without giving you a chance to log in.
Workaround: Connect to that computer over file sharing first.
- Useless text anti-aliasing
The standard text anti-aliasing, introduced in Microsoft Plus! for Windows 95 and subsequently integrated into Windows 98+ and 2000+, is effectively useless. It has no effect at small sizes (like 12 pt), which is when the benefit is the greatest. Workaround: Enable ClearType, even if you are not using an LCD monitor. ClearType keeps most fonts anti-aliased at all sizes.
File creation timestampsIf you take file X and rename it or move it away, then (in the same folder) quickly create/rename/copy/move another file to have the same name as X, it will take on file X’s old creation timestamp.
Folder creation timestampsThe creation time for a folder is not preserved when it is moved to a different drive letter. Workaround: Copy the folder (instead of move), then use a C# program to clone the creation timestamps.
- Time zones and timestamps
In NTFS, file/folder timestamps are stored in UTC (GMT). When your time zone changes, the timestamps will appear to change. Even daylight saving time counts as a time zone change – e.g. if you modified a file at 09:00 in winter time, then it will appear to have been modified at 10:00 when you query it during summer time. On the other hand, FAT (12/16/32) stores timestamps in local time, so they never change. This can be a problem when moving/copying files between FAT and NTFS partitions, especially when the local time zone is not static.
Phantom floppy-
If your motherboard has a floppy controller, then Windows XP shows the floppy drive in My Computer even if no floppy disk drive is attached to the computer.
Workaround: Use TweakUI to hide it.
- Selection rectangle
Windows XP Explorer got a new translucent selection rectangle. But the desktop still uses the old dotted black-and-transparent selection rectangle.
- Desktop item selection using shift key
When holding down the shift key and selecting items on the desktop by using either the mouse or the arrow keys, the selection disappears at certain arbitrary positions.
Last modified: 2007-10-18-Thu
Created: 2007-04-12-Thu