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SuperMemo 2000 was written in Delphi 5.0 which was not officially certified for use with Windows 2000 due it its release preceding the availability of the final build of Windows 2000 to software developers.

Nevertheless, its is perfectly possible to use SuperMemo 2000 in Windows 2000 as long as you learn to live with some minor inconveniences listed in this document.

Important! Please check the build number of your SuperMemo (Help : About) to make sure you can avail of the features listed herein. If you build is less than 10.08 or older than May 31, 2001, please write for update instructions. Remember that if you are not using Windows 2000, you do not need to update. No new features can be found in build 10.08.

"Improved" rich text controls

In Windows 2000, Microsoft substantially "improved" rich edit controls that made using incremental reading in SuperMemo 2000 nigh onto impossible. If you paste web content into SuperMemo (or WordPad) in Windows 2000, it will include lots of garbage such as hyperlinks, scripts, tables, etc. If thus imported hyperlinks were clickable, you would certainly welcome the improvement. However, the imported hyperlinks are non-functional, and what makes them particularly annoying is that they cannot be differentiated from legitimate text at rtf source level. In other words, SuperMemo cannot provide you with an error-free filter that would eliminate hyperlink garbage in the same way as if they were pasted to SuperMemo in Windows NT 4.0. The worst side effect of the new rich edit control is that some bullets tend to proliferate on editing, and the control may return wrong character counts that will fool SuperMemo into cutting wrong pieces of text in Remember extract and similar options.

To remedy the problem we added two workaround solutions to SuperMemo 2000:

RTF source filter: if you choose Text : Filter from the rich component's pop-up menu (or simply press F6), you will be able to filter the text at the source level and remove codes that make incremental reading difficult
RTF source editing: for rtf source debugging (experts only), you can also choose Edit : View source from the rich component's pop-up menu (or press F12) to correct texts manually

In most cases, you can also use Edit : Edit file (F9) to edit the text in your default word processor (e.g. MS Word); however, simply opening the file in MS Word will not remedy the messy hyperlink import. You will need to do some editing or apply Normal template to the selected text.

If formatting is not essential for a given article, two other workarounds for messy imports can be used:

convert it to plain text with Text : Plain text or Ctrl+Shift+F12, or
paste the text to Notepad, copy it again, and only then import it to SuperMemo

Rich text blinking

New rich edit controls also tend to blink at typing each character in editing. This can be very striking if you switch between different versions of Windows. Even on very fast computers the blinking is noticeable. However, it takes no more than a day to get used to this difference, and it tends to blend painlessly in the background

Rich text refresh problems

In Windows 2000, Microsoft changed the refresh modes on rich edit controls. As a result, SuperMemo 2000 may not refresh the entire rich edit component upon applying a layout or changing the window size. Additional refresh calls had to be added. If you use an older version of SuperMemo, you can simply click on the rich edit control and press Esc. Entering and quitting the editing mode will refresh the control

Taskbar does not hide

Certain layouts in SuperMemo 2000 seem to somehow block the auto-hide feature of the Windows 2000 taskbar. This may show as frozen taskbar or a taskbar that does not want to reappear on mouse move. The simple workaround is to turn on the status bar with Window : Status bar. Occasionally, even this fails. If your taskbar freezes, click the status bar in SuperMemo to hide it.

Windows taskbar often fails to auto-hide with many other applications, too. Frozen taskbar should resolve by clicking on highlighted application that requested activation; however, on occasion only logging off the current user seems to help. To all appearances, this is a problem caused by a major bug in Windows 2000