All entries for March 2007

Retro Vista

I was silly enough to buy a new computer just as Microsoft was launching a new operating system – Windows Vista.

One of its annoyances is the removal of XP’s ability to easily associate more than one program with a single file extension. I found this feature, which Windows 98 had as well, rather useful. With htm, jpg and gif files, I think the best program for editing is not the best for viewing.

It is possible to get Vista to associate more than one program with a single file extension, but you must be prepared to either delve into the registry or buy third party software. A work-around, which reminds me of that days before Graphical User Interfaces, is to start with the program and then select the file rather than the other way around.

See

• search for Associate a file type or protocol with a program on microsoft.com (thread started 08 Mar 2007, 9:57)

: 15 Mar 2007 12:01 |  Comments (6) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

An Invisible Font

I spent six and a half hours yesterday finding and fixing a corrupted Windows/Fonts file.
One effect of the problem was that nothing appeared on my screen when I typed characters into Amazon’s search box. Nevertheless, what I had typed was used as a search criterion when I clicked on GO.
After about two hours of examining the page’s html I concluded that when the Style attribute of an element included “font-family: fixed;” blanks were rendered rather than visible characters.
You might have a similar problem if you can’t see one of these words fixed proportional serif sans-serif cursiv fantasy monospace in the following list:

• fixed

• proportional

• serif

• sans-serif

• cursiv

• fantasy

• monospace

I then spent another hour trying to find what was wrong with Mozilla as there was no problem with IE. I concluded it wasn’t Mozilla/Firefox’s fault – the culprit was a duff Windows/Fonts file.
There are a mere 457 files in my version of Windows/Fonts. And deleting one often doesn’t have an impact until after a restart. Hence it took me three hours to isolate the culprit: a corrupted version of phonetic.fon

: 07 Mar 2007 09:35 |  Tags: Computers |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem