[Offtopic] ShellExView
Roland Gesthuizen
rge at westallsc.vic.edu.au
Sun Oct 23 20:42:40 EST 2005
screen grabMy laptop has been behaving odd for a few weeks. When I try
to use right mouse function on folders or objects, it took a very long
time to trigger a response. I had put up with it until today when I dug
up some advice pages that matched my symptoms. The problem turned out to
be caused by a corrupt or poorly coded context menu handler. Today I
downloaded a free program called ShellExView
<http://www.snapfiles.com/download/dlshellexview.html> to gradually work
my way though the extensions listed, disabling and enabling several
extensions at a time until I had narrowed down the culprit. Another
happy laptop user. :-)
I have learned something else too.
Windows once stored information about configuration settings in INI
files <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INI_file> that were scattered all
over a computer system. This was generally superseded by a centralised
Windows registry. Sadly, this has created a new problem of a central
point of failure
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_registry#Criticisms_of_the_Registry_concept>.
Damage to a registry file can sometimes be only fixed by a hard drive
format and system reinstall.
Linux on the other hand manages this quite differently. Most system wide
settings are stored in a single directory called |*/etc*|, while
user-specific settings are stored in the user's home directory as hidden
files. Nearly all the Linux settings are stored as text files that can
be edited with any text editor. Macintosh systems do something similar.
--
Roland Gesthuizen - eLearning Coordinator - Westall Secondary College
http://www.westallsc.vic.edu.au
-------------- next part --------------
Skipped content of type multipart/related
More information about the offtopic
mailing list