June 2007 - Posts

What a Heap of ... (Part Two)
29 June 07 05:14 AM

On Tuesday, we talked about Heap - what it is and how it works. Today we're going to continue our look at Heap. At the end of the last post we mentioned Look-Aside Lists and Low Fragmentation Heap. But before we dive into those, let's take a look at Heap Read More...

Postedby CC Hameed | 4 Comments    

Filed under: architecture, debugging, memory management, performance, troubleshooting

What a Heap of ... (Part One)
26 June 07 05:10 AM

Today's post is actually the result of a recent series of questions on Heap and the Heap Manager that I fumbled quite hopelessly! Once I got back to my desk, I pulled out my trusty copy of Windows Internals and started reading. The more I read, the more Read More...

Postedby CC Hameed | 3 Comments    

Filed under: architecture, memory management, troubleshooting

Basic WMI Testing
22 June 07 05:16 AM

OK - following on from our recent WMI Architecture post, let's start digging into some Basic WMI Troubleshooting. There's a lot of material to cover, so this is going to be a multi-part series! It's important to note that these are general concepts and Read More...

Postedby CC Hameed | 5 Comments    

Filed under: troubleshooting, WMI

Basic Printing Architecture
19 June 07 05:04 AM

Printer sharing, information retrieval, and data storage are among the most frequently used network services. This also means that when something major happens to a print server or file server - lots of people are adversely affected. Issues with Print Read More...

Postedby CC Hameed | 4 Comments    

Filed under: architecture, printing

Capturing Application Crash Dumps
15 June 07 04:36 AM

Following on from our posts on the Basic Troubleshooting Toolkit and Basic Debugging of an Application Crash , let's talk about actually capturing Application crash dumps and failures. Most administrators are familiar with the Dr. Watson for Windows tool Read More...

Postedby CC Hameed | 14 Comments    

Filed under: debugging, troubleshooting, vista, windows server 2008

WMI Architecture Basics
12 June 07 05:24 AM

Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) is one of those technologies that tends to intimidate administrators who are unfamiliar with it. On the Performance team, we handle basic WMI issues - mainly relating to basic WMI functionality and permissions. Read More...

Postedby CC Hameed | 2 Comments    

Filed under: architecture, WMI

COM and DCOM for Administrators
08 June 07 04:48 AM

So today we're going to cover the basics of COM and DCOM. The key word here is basic - if you need to get into a depth discussion about how your custom components are working (or not working in some cases!) and your code, then you should be working with Read More...

Postedby CC Hameed | 4 Comments    

Filed under: architecture, COM / DCOM

The Basics of Group Policies
05 June 07 05:41 AM

The Performance team handles Group Policies for several different components - most notably Printing, Internet Explorer and Terminal Server. In most environments, the Active Directory administrator handles the design, implementation and maintenance all Read More...

Postedby CC Hameed | 4 Comments    

Filed under: two minute drill, troubleshooting, GPO

Troubleshooting with Process Monitor
01 June 07 06:03 AM

In our post last month regarding a Basic Troubleshooting Toolkit , one of the tools we mentioned was Process Monitor. The new version of Process Monitor combines the old Process Monitor tool with the File Monitor (FileMon) and Registry Monitor (RegMon) Read More...

Postedby CC Hameed | 5 Comments    

Filed under: two minute drill, troubleshooting