Windows “Tricks Microsoft Can’t Explain” — Actually Explained

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An old chain email used to circulate claiming these were "tricks Microsoft can’t explain." They’re all real behaviours — and one popular claim is an outright hoax — but none of them are actually unexplained. Here’s what’s really going on with each.

1. You can’t name a folder "CON"

True, and it’s not a mystery. CON, along with PRN, AUX, NUL, COM1–COM9 and LPT1–LPT9, are reserved device names that Windows inherited from MS-DOS. The system treats them as hardware devices (CON = console), so it won’t let you use them as ordinary file or folder names. It’s documented behaviour, not a bug.

2. "Bush hid the facts" in Notepad

In old versions of Notepad, typing this phrase (or any 4-3-3-5 letter pattern) and reopening the file showed garbled characters. This was a flaw in the way Notepad auto-detected text encoding (the IsTextUnicode function) — it mistook the plain ASCII bytes for Unicode. It was a known bug and no longer happens in modern Windows.

3. =rand(200,99) in Microsoft Word

Typing =rand(200,99) and pressing Enter fills the document with text. Again, not magic — it’s a documented Word feature. =rand(p,s) inserts p paragraphs of s sentences of placeholder text, handy for testing page layouts.

4. The "Q33N" 9/11 flight number in Wingdings

A long-running chain email claims that a flight which hit the World Trade Center on 9/11 was numbered Q33N, and that if you type Q33N in Notepad or Word, increase the font size, and change the font to Wingdings, you see a plane, two documents, a skull, and a Star of David.

This is a hoax. None of the four aircraft involved in the September 11 attacks had the flight number Q33N — they were American Airlines Flights 11 and 77, and United Airlines Flights 175 and 93. The Wingdings symbols are simply that font’s normal glyphs for those letters; you can type almost any characters and get a row of pictures. It’s a coincidence dressed up as a hidden message, and it has been widely debunked. We’ve kept it here only to set the record straight.

7 thoughts on “Windows “Tricks Microsoft Can’t Explain” — Actually Explained”

  1. Magic #1 is an easy explain. CON is a special device descriptor for console. try in command line:
    copy con asdf [return]

    it waits for input and a control-z. type whatever, control-z, return and you will have copied that text to a file named asdf. Other protected descriptors are ports like COM1,2,3,4 LPT1,2,3,4 NULL. catch them all.

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  2. And for me #2 did nothing.

    But . . . Number three is very well known by the programming staff at Microsoft because they created it. This output is all of the help file data in one flat file ready to be properly formatted. When you click on a help topic it goes to the right portion of the file, copies the text for X number of characters, and displays it in a neat little box for you. Have you ever wondered why you never see physical help files in your Microsoft applications? This is why.

    There are more of these Rand codes that do other neat things like make the screen flash or make the computer seem to type by itself. Some have a practical purpose, some were just for fun, falling under what the programmers call Easter Eggs.

    Number four is an easy one. . . There was no flight Q33N used in the attacks on 9/11. Someone simply figured out how to create a weird message using wingdings and told everyone else there was such a flight number. Check it out for yourself – a simple Google search on the 9/11 attacks will prove this one.

    — The Eclectic Skeptic — I can doubt pretty much anything people say.

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      • Number 2 is odd, it definitely ‘worked’ on this museum install of XP – the text turned showed up as a sequence of what looked to be non ascii chars. Didn’t actually change the file, but notepad just wouldn’t re-display it.

        I’m using an ‘improved’ jiggered-with version called Notepad2 but I assume it’s using the same API calls / std windows objects as the original application. Anyhow it refused to re-display a file consisting of that string – how it got created made no difference that character sequence alone in a file will not render (so far that is, at 00:50 in the middle of the night!) Curious, regardless of how old this page may be 🙂 Thanks for the distraction 🙂 Dave J. [Missing Usenet!]

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