Some Amazing Windows XP Mysteries

Mystery # 1

Folder Name:

In Windows XP you can not create a folder by the name of CON

Try it out yourself it can't be done!


The why:

 It’s pretty simple, Con is a reserved name from the early days from DOS, it stands for the “CONSOLE” I/O device, Since it is already used by the system. If we create one with some evil tricks then the system will get confused. There will be an ambiguity.

Like Con, many other reserve words are there which we can’t create. They are
PRN - It stands for printer.
AUX - It stands for Auxiliary device.
COM0, COM1, COM2, COM3, COM4, COM5, COM6, COM7, COM8, COM9 - They stands for serial ports.

NUL - It stands for Bid Bucket.
LPT1, LPT2 - They stands for Parallel ports.

Mystery # 2

Now do the following:

1. Open an empty notepad file
2. Type "Bush hid the facts" (without the quotes)
3. Save it as whatever you want.
4. Close it, and re-open it.

When the phrase "Bush hid the facts" is typed into the Windows XP versions of Notepad as instructed above, the re-opened file displays an unreadable line of squares or Chinese style characters.

The why:

Bush hid the facts is a common name for a bug present in the function IsTextUnicode of Microsoft Windows, which causes a file of text encoded in Windows-1252 or similar encoding to be interpreted as if it were UTF-16LE, resulting in mojibake. When "Bush hid the facts" is put in a new Notepad document and saved, closed, and reopened, the words "畂桳栠摩琠敨映捡獴" (Liu Benrenmotian Touyingjianmeng) appear instead.

Mystery # 3

Open Microsoft Word and type

=rand (200, 99)

And then press ENTER

The why:
Theory 1: Some people believe that the sentence "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" which is displayed, is a sentence that contains all 26 letters of the roman alphabet. As such, it's a convenient test phrase when testing things like fonts and markup.

Theory 2: Others believe Microsoft left Easter Eggs (hidden surprises) since office 97.