| THE | E | LIST | N | EWS |
| by Mr. E | ||||
Compressed Folder Becomes Corrupted When Larger than 4 GB Win XP (New content 6/5/02)
This is a serious problem! The information has been available since June of last year, but I still run into people getting bitten by this bug, and the bite isn’t pretty.
Windows XP has native capability to create zip files, called “compressed files.” One of the reasons people often do this is to take very large files and scrunch them down to save space. For example, you might want to squeeze a few gigabytes of MP3s into a smaller space, or do a backup of your whole system to a second hard drive and then zip it to save space. Really big files aren’t the only thing to use this for, of course, but they do stand as very likely candidates.
Unfortunately, if the resulting zip file is larger than 4 GB, you’re probably screwed. It may not be readable. Also unfortunately, there’s no way to tell in advance that this will occur, since you don’t know the size of your zip file until it is made. Even more unfortunately, there are no error messages generated — everything looks, on the outside, like the compression went just fine. You would have every reason to assume that it had worked perfectly. But it probably didn’t, and you probably don’t have a valid file.
The work-around for this is to be careful! If there is the slightest risk that the resulting file will be larger than 4 GB, don’t drag a file into a compressed folder. Instead, select one or more files, right-click, and use Send To to copy them into a compressed (i.e., zipped) file. Or, if the zip file already exists, open it and copy the additional file into it. However you make or supplement these files, check the size afterwards and, if it is more than 4 GB, open the zip file and make sure you can access its contents. Always leave yourself a back door.
Microsoft’s recommended work-around is to not create compressed files larger than 4 GB.
Search Companion Starts If You Double-Click a Folder Win XP (New content 6/5/02)
Due to a Registry error, the exact problem described in this article’s title can occur: when you click to open a folder, instead of the folder opening, Win XP’s Search Companion may launch. But this isn’t the only undesirable outcome you can get. If you have configured any other Actions for File Folders in your Folder Options (Windows Explorer | Tools | Folder Options | File Types | choose File Folders | Advanced), that option may get launched instead.
Why does this happen? According to Microsoft, a specific set of user actions triggers this bug in Win XP. If you opened the folder in Explorer, clicked the options listed above to enter the Advanced options for File Folders and make a change, a value is removed from a Registry key referring to the Default option. This occurs whether you create a new Action, edit existing Actions, or change the default Action in the Edit File Type dialog box.
To fix it, make a Registry change. The article tells you how. But, to make it easy on you, after you the article you can click here to download a Registry patch to do this repair.
Display Resolution & Color Depth Settings Apply to All Users Win XP (New content 6/23/02)
One of the most common “customize my eXperience” questions from Windows XP users is this: Other users on my computer want a different screen resolution than I want. How do we set a different screen resolution for each user?
The answer to this one is really easy: You don’t. Sorry. That’s the way it was designed. And that’s the bottom line of this KB article: Screen resolution remains the same when switching between different user profiles on the same machine. This behavior is by design.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: It occurs to me that I should explain what “This behavior is by design” means. Its use in the present article will likely lead to a lot more questions, so I might as well address them in advance. Sometimes this phrase means, “We sat down and thought about it, and took all the user input into consideration and decided this was the best way to go.” As may occur to you, this is probably not what the phrase means here! It is highly unlikely that the Microsoft designers and programmers sat down and decided that there was a great and wonderful reason you should not have the option to pick a different default resolution for each user profile. No, what the surface meaning of this phrase doesn’t take into consideration is that sometimes there are numerous reasons behind a particular design decision. For example, the limitation of certain Windows 95 resource pools to 64 KB size was “by design” — Microsoft meant to do it that way — because during the Win95 Beta testing it was determined that a very high percentage of legacy programs would fail to run unless MS designed Win95 this way. Even when several years of advances in new hardware and software made this a real catastrophe to many Windows ME users, the behavior was still “by design,” because they were still intentionally using the old architecture for the same reason. I suspect a similar situation exists with the current issue, though I don’t know the details of the decision making process during the Win XP Beta. A Windows operating system is a complex entity. Shove something the right way in one place, and it may shove something else the wrong way somewhere else. Swallow too much phosphorus, and it will leach the calcium out of your bones (which, by the way, is why you shouldn’t take calcium supplements from sea shells; it will have a negative-gain effect on the amount of calcium in your system). It is most likely that trying to enable a unique screen resolution default for each Win XP user profile was going to break something else. Therefore, they left out that capability “by design.” It is equally likely that, given the amount of consumer flack MS has gotten on this one, they will have an alternative on the drawing boards for future Windows versions.
How to Restore the Windows Default Fonts Win95, Win98, Win98 SE (New content 6/23/02)
Says what it does, and does what it says. If you find that you have incomplete or corrupted fonts, this article will help you get your basic Windows fonts back in place.