Retro Corner

Bits and pieces about classic Windows, older machines, and the fine art of making a computer do a lot with a little. New articles appear when the mood strikes.

Ten keyboard tricks every Windows 95 user should know

A pocket history of Windows

Why we write native code

A fashionable question: why bother with plain C and the raw Win32 API when Visual Basic and friends will paint you a window in five minutes?

Because the machine your user owns is not the machine you develop on. Out there in the real world, computers have 8 or 16 MB of RAM, a 486 or an entry Pentium, and a hard disk measured in hundreds of megabytes. A program that drags a multi-megabyte runtime behind it, or assumes a math coprocessor, or repaints the whole window when one line changes, is a program that feels slow — no matter how clever its features are.

Native code returns the favor of the user's hardware money. A carefully written native program can render anti-aliased pages in modest memory, on a plain CPU, in 256 colors, and still feel snappy — because every allocation, every blit and every integer was argued over. That argument is the fun part of programming. We would not trade it for any wizard.

Squeezing more out of your Windows 95 machine

	Get TweakUI (part of Microsoft PowerToys) — window animation off, menu speed up. Feels like a hardware upgrade, costs nothing.
	Run ScanDisk and Defrag once in a while — a fragmented disk is the number one cause of a "tired" PC.
	Trim your Startup folder — every icon down by the clock is RAM you paid for and cannot use.
	Prefer small native tools — a 450 KB viewer starts before a 20 MB suite has found its splash screen. (We may be biased. We are also right.)
	16 MB of RAM is the single best upgrade for Windows 95 — the difference between constant disk-swapping and actual computing.

More articles coming soon