It all starts with Windows NT, the secure Windows. NT4 added many features and a nice visual onto NT 3.5, but it crashed a lot. Windows 2000 fixed a lot of crashes, and became the stable Windows OS. XP added better multimedia, and improved ways to handle network security. After service pack 2, XP was stable and good.

Vista added many features. The problem was, it added too many new features that also slowed the machine down, a lot. Customers bought new, faster computers expecting them to be faster, but they were slower. Everything worked differently too. People were frustrated. Vista flopped.

Windows 7 design goal was "performance". Generally, the easiest way to improve how fast a system feels is to stop running programs that you're not using. Windows 7 does that. It comes with less software installed. Reportedly, it's still slower than XP, but faster than Vista.

They also fixed up a lot of interface issues and added some features.

There are so many versions of Windows out there - not only XP, Vista, and 7; not only Home and Pro, Ultimate or Basic or whatever; but also the Corporate, OEM, and Retail; and for each of those, a different media, different manufacturers, and even different vintages. So, suppose you, like I, found a junked computer and revived it, but reinstalled from your own copy of XP Home. During registration, the CD Key on the sticker on the case will not work. The media you have, and the media the computer came with are not the same.

Despite this, you have a legit XP Home license. (I have four of them, collected from junked computers.) You have the computer, and the motherboard. You could call Microsoft... but they may not activate you. If it hasn't happened yet, they will eventually refuse to activate Windows XP.

Enter the hack. While some people like to call MS, some would rather just find a quick, reliable technical solution. That solution is called AntiWPA; to find it, search for it.

I'm starting to forget this one already, but, recently, I dealt with a virus that hacks the shell and inserts a handler for .EXE file.

There are different theories on why Open Source succeeds or fails (and opinions on whether it's succeeding or failing). The most common is not a theory at all, but the idea of "giving back to the community": that companies will give away assets because they're receiving assets for free from the community. It sounds nice, but, it's a really weak idea.

I was testing a new product called Mailarchiva, and I misunderstood the instructions. The upshot was that a mailbox full of messages was moved into Mailarchiva, and I wanted to restore them to the mailbox.

I had to download Windows Mobile 6 for Blackjack (1), and kept getting an error message.

Some proxies allowed me to get to it, but, wanted $$$ to download the file.

It turns out that Samsung's site is using the REFERER field to restrict access to the file. There's a feature in Firefox 3, and also in Chrome, that helps get around this problem.

This is a diagram of upgrade paths between the various Microsoft operating systems that you can purchase through TechSoup. TechSoup is an organization that sells nonprofit organizations software at low prices. Generally, people in an organization want XP Professional, because it connects to Windows Server. If you buy a cheap computer today, it comes with Vista Home Basic... and there's no cheap downgrade path to XP Pro. (Meaning organizations have to buy a system with Vista Business preinstalled.)

What's kind of funny is that there's an upgrade path from Windows 98 to Vista.

This is a pretty good de-duper based on the one posted to a forum.

This is trial code that I used to translate an error from a Yahoo web service into a COM ErrObject.

It's not real XML parsing, but good enough for this purpose. IF an error message is sent, we extract the message and then use Err.Raise to throw an error.

I was having a real WTF moment with Access. I'd coded up an SQL query in access, and a string had a single quote in it, fouling up the query.

The SQL was something like this:

I got this in BackupExec 10d. It probably started because I enabled circular logging.

Firefox stops working. No error messages. No crashes. It just stops. Also, reinstalling doesn't fix it.

Here's how I got out of that situation:
* Uninstall Firefox.

This is some code and controls that help you geocode addresses, and prepare a report of addresses sorted by distance from a point.

Seems like a lot of people are having a problem because Access automatically hides a subreport if it contains no records.

This is a subroutine that will scan your Outlook inbox or a subfolder of inbox named "Bounces", and copy bounced email addresses to a MS Access database.