June, 2008

Hi there, this is Mark with the Windows Performance Team. This post is a quick introduction to a new performance tracing tool called XPerf. Moving forward with Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, this powerful tool will hopefully be utilized more often...

Today we are looking at a couple of new changes/additions to the Task Scheduler service in Windows Vista and Server 2008.  As an overview, the Task Scheduler service provides controlled, unattended management of task execution, launched either on...

There are sometimes situations where printing of very large documents containing high resolution graphics, text and images is needed.  With the growing technology of high end cameras flourishing in the market, image sizes are growing larger and larger...

In my previous posting on Access Violations, I briefly mentioned Data Execution Prevention (DEP).  I have recently had the opportunity to work on a couple of customer issues that caused me to dig a bit deeper into the workings of DEP, so I figured...

When customers call us with issues – in particular application or program failures, one of the first questions that we ask is, “What changed in the environment”. More often than not, the answer is, “Nothing”. In some cases, that may be true, however in...

In our last post, we talked about Pages and Page Tables.  Today, we’re going to take a look at one of the most common problems when dealing with virtual memory – the Page Fault.  A page fault occurs when a program requests an address on a page...

Over the course of our posts on Memory Management and Architecture , we have made several references to Page Tables and Page Table Entries (PTE’s). Today we’re going to dig into Pages and Page Tables. If you are new to Memory Management, or need a quick...

I am sure we have all seen access violations occur since we took ownership of our first x86 PC's.  The infamous "Bluescreen", application crashes, it doesn't really matter, access violations are all over the place.  For any of you...