Secret Myths In Xp

Myth(Definition) - "A fiction or half-truth, especially one that forms part of an ideology." There are numerous Myths floating around the Internet regarding Windows XP, especially relating to Optimizations and Security. Hopefully this site will debunk some of these.

There are various myths people incorrectly think are hidden Secrets, Easter eggs or bugs in Windows XP.

'CON' Folder

Myth - "Not being able to name a file or folder 'CON' is a bug or a secret"

Reality - "Several special file names are reserved by the system and cannot be used for files or folders: CON, AUX, COM1, COM2, COM3, COM4, LPT1, LPT2, LPT3, PRN, NUL. This goes back to DOS 1.0 which didn't support subdirectories, lowercase, or filenames longer than 8.3. 'CON' is a reserved word from the old DOS days, simply meaning 'console'. If you wanted to create a new text file in DOS you could type 'copy con newfile.txt' meaning copy from the console to newfile.txt. This would let you type some lines and when you ended the file you would have a file called newfile.txt containing whatever you wrote in the console. Since they are still relied on with things like batch files (redirect to >NUL) they are still reserved today." -




Notepad Phrases

Myth - "There are Secret phrases like "bush hid the facts" you can type into Notepad"

Reality - "Notepad makes a best guess of which encoding to use when confronted with certain short strings of characters that lack special prefixes. The encodings that do not have special prefixes and which are still supported by Notepad are the traditional ANSI encoding (i.e., "plain ASCII") and the Unicode (little-endian) encoding with no BOM. When faced with a file that lacks a special prefix, Notepad is forced to guess which of those two encodings the file actually uses. The function that does this work is IsTextUnicode, which studies a chunk of bytes and does some statistical analysis to come up with a guess. Sometimes it guesses wrong and displays random characters after you save and open the file. Any combination of characters in the same order 4-3-3-5 will cause the same problem: "Bill lie and cheat" "this app can break", "hhhh hhh hhh hhhhh", "this isa bug dummy" ect..." -


Telnet Star Wars

Myth - "There is a hidden ASCII version of Star Wars in Windows"

Reality - "No hidden version of Star Wars exists in Windows. This version is accessed over the Internet using a program called Telnet. Telnet is a simple, text-based program that allows you to connect to another computer by using the Internet. While Telnet is included in Windows, the ASCII (text-based) version of Star Wars is not. Simply disconnecting or powering down your modem will prevent you from watching it. This is no different from watching a video file over the Internet but instead of using a web browser you are using the Telnet program. These text-based animations can be viewed online at ASCIIMATION.co.nz" -