Windows 3.0, Happy 20th Birthday!

20 years ago today, Windows 3.0 was released.

These days, almost everyone is familiar with the "Start" menu in the left-bottom corner of their Windows desktop, the fancy themes, toolbars, and menus. All computers running modern Windows now have these features. But it wasn’t always that way. Very few people remember about the days back before the "Start" button, when they had the simple desktop and the file manager.

Windows 3.0 was not really an operating system. It was a graphical environment with many application services. You had to start it by running the ‘win’ command from the DOS prompt. It relied on DOS not only for booting the computer, but for many basic services like file I/O.

As the third major release of the Windows platform from Microsoft, it offered improved performance, advanced graphics with 16 colors, and full support of the more powerful Intel 386 processor. A new wave of 386 PCs helped drive the popularity of Windows 3.0, which offered a wide range of useful features and capabilities, such as File Manager, Write, Paint Brush, Print manager and Program manager.

The Windows 3.0 GUI is also widely regarded as the reason why IBM killed its own OS/2 operating system. Microsoft launched Windows 3.0 despite the fact that it had signed a strategic partnership with Big Blue to support OS/2.

The rest, as they say, is history. Windows 3.0 was soon to be forgotten as Windows NT and Windows 3.11 were launched a few years later.

For those looking to have a quick play with the Windows 3.1 Program Manager, can visit Michael Vincent’s website and fool around with the Windows 3.1 emulator:

 

See the Windows History at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/winhistorydesktop.mspx and at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Microsoft_Windows, and read more about Windows 3.0 at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_3.0

“God Mode” in Windows 7

Everybody is talking about the so called Windows 7 "God Mode."

What is it, you ask? Simply create a new folder, call it GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C} and you will have a shortcut to every setting on your computer.

Sounds great right? Only if you are the kind of person that likes to navigate through a list of 255 tasks instead of simply typing in what you need.

There are no new features or settings exposed. Only a list of tasks that can be accomplished within the so simple Control Panel search.

The feature is actually not even called God Mode but All Tasks. The All Tasks feature is simply a shell folder you can access a few different ways. Just type shell:::{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C} in the windows explorer address bar and hit <Enter>.  Alternatively, create a folder and name it anything.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}.

Someone probably named the folder “GodMode” just to make it sound mysterious and intriguing.

BTW, it also works on VISTA 32bit.

The Security System detected an authentication error

Last week I came across a weird problem.

I wasn’t able to connect to a share on a remote server using it’s IP Address in the UNC path, but had no problem at all using it’s NetBIOS name or it’s FQDN.

I took a look at the event log and saw these 2 event entries:

A quick Google search got me here, and there it reads:

Stored User Names and Passwords is a feature of Microsoft Windows XP and the Windows Server 2003 family that stores user names and passwords for servers. This allows a user to connect to servers using user names and passwords that are different than those used to log on to the network. The user can store these for later reuse.

So I opened up the Stored User Names and Passwords applet, happy to see an entry saved in the Credentials Manager that had my “problematic” IP Address:

  

Removed that entry…

and voila! I can access the server again!

 

The Stored User Names and Passwords interface is accessible from the Control Panel -> User Accounts applet (on Windows XP) or Control Panel -> Stored User Names and Passwords applet (on Windows 2003 Server). Also, you can run it using any of the two command lines:

rundll32.exe keymgr.dll,KRShowKeyMgr

control keymgr.dll

 

Since this was such a simple solution to such an annoying problem, I thought I’d share.