When Windows 10 starts and users logon, the operating system by default will automatically restart all the applications that were running when the system was rebooted including launching them to reload the documents and revisit web browser URLs. Handy in concept this is not how I want the machine to behave. I would like a clean desktop, that looks the same everytime the machine boots. Thankfully, there's a setting for this, not well advertised, but it does exit.
Categories: "Computer Programming"
The DOS world's need for memory grew and the 64KB available to .COM executables was no longer adequate. The NE "new executable" executable file format was invented and uses the .EXE file extension rather than .COM. The first 2 bytes of these files includes a tag at the front to identify the format and if you guessed that this was "NE" to denote "new executable", you'd be incorrect. The first 2 bytes of every .EXE file are "MZ" famously because the name of the programmer at Microsoft who wrote the code was "Mark Zbikowski".
In the beginning, the DOS .COM file format was the format for executables of size less than 64KB and let's face it, who would really need more. I'm headed down a path to discuss PE file format executables and no good discussion is right without a foundation. In the beginning, there was DOS; life was simple and there was nothing between you and the computer. This post describes the early executable .COM file format showing code, data, everything that you need for small executables!
RIFF (.wav) file format has been around unchanged since the early 1990s and still in common use today. This goes back to a time when CD audio formats were king and RIFF .wav follows the red book convention pretty closely, with the change that the number of channels, bits per sample and samples per second can vary as described in the file header.
As an example file, I have selected TADA.WAV from Windows 10, \windows\media\tada.wav. This file is 285,228 bytes, the important part is in the first 44 bytes shown here.
When your computer has more than 1 sound card, you may find it cumbersome to change audio devices. The standard method requires going through the control panel or settings application , a process of multiple dialogs and multiple clicks. There is a better way.