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Hello folks, today I would like to take some time and highlight some of the new UI changes in the shell for Windows 8.1. Windows 8.1 introduces several changes that allow the user to personalize and enhance the overall user experience. Start Screen The Start Screen now provides more customization options...

BLANK DESKTOP IN RDP SESSION Description: A Terminal Server session can also be defined as remote access to a desktop. When creating a session to a Terminal Server/Remote Desktop Server there are a several stages of the connection process that must be successful before the user can interact with...

Good morning AskPerf.  Today’s post is a very short one, but it does address one of our most common Shell / Windows UI questions.  That question is, “Why can’t I see the size of folders in Windows Explorer?”  The simple answer is that the behavior is by design.  You can view the size...

WINDOWS EXPLORER FOLDER OPTIONS Description: Many of the concerns around Folder Options in Explorer center around administrators needing to control how Explorer presents folders to users. Sometimes these options may not be available at all or there may be problems with Explorer...

WINDOWS EXPLORER - HANG / CRASH Description: Windows explorer can often fail in one of two ways: A hang, or a crash. The reasons for these behaviors may be different but the data needed to troubleshoot them are often the same. Scoping the Issue: The first thing to be determined is whether...

START MENU / TASKBAR ISSUES Description: The Start menu and taskbar in Windows are customizable. Legacy operating systems and Windows Vista\Windows Server 2008 using the Windows Classic theme consist of the word START and the Windows Logo. Vista and its new theme have completely removed the word...

SEARCH / WINDOWS DESKTOP SEARCH Description: Search has become an integral part of everyday computing. There are several versions of Search available for windows. Windows Search is available for download on Windows XP and built in to Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. Most of our support...

FONTS Description: A font is a collection of numbers, symbols, and characters. A font describes a certain typeface, along with other qualities, such as size, spacing, and pitch. TrueType fonts and OpenType fonts come with Windows. They work with a variety of computers, printers, and programs...

DISPLAY / PERSONALIZATION APPLET Description: The Personalization Applet (Right-Click the desktop and select Personalize) has been redesigned in Vista and higher to use a series of well-organized, task-oriented pages instead of bare categories. The Personalization page allows you to customize...

DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME Description: Daylight Saving Time implementation varies from country to country. Some countries may not observe daylight saving time, whereas other countries may change the start dates and end dates for daylight saving time every year. This can cause administrative confusion...

ADD / REMOVE PROGRAMS OR PROGRAMS & FEATURES APPLET Description: When viewing the Add\Remove Programs applet, you may see incorrect information or the applet may not display at all. This may be caused by missing files, corrupt files, and or incorrect permissions. Scoping the...

BLANK DESKTOP (non-RDP session) Description: Often we may attempt to logon to a machine and find no visible shell or Explorer.exe present. On the surface this might appear to look difficult to troubleshoot due to the lack of a shell, however a few steps can help determine possible causes and...

Hello folks, Prabhakar Shettigar here once more with another odd case from the trenches. Recently my colleague Sumesh wrote about how Not All Systems Are Truly Equal . Following on from his post, I thought I’d share some interesting anecdotes about a couple of strange cases I worked involving one of...

Hello AskPerf!  My name is Satyajit and I am a Support Engineer on the Performance team.  Today we’re going to discuss the use of a very useful Windows SysInternals tools named Autoruns that we can use to examine programs that start during the boot process or the login process.  This comes...

Over the last couple of weeks, we have had some customers asking about support for ClearType in a Terminal Services session.  Now, if you’re not sure what exactly ClearType is, the ClearType information page on the Microsoft site has information on the basics of ClearType.  In a nutshell though...

Server Message Block (SMB) traffic is an application-level network protocol typically used for file and print sharing. Microsoft implements SMB in Windows operating systems through the Workstation and Server services; the client and server components respectively. Although our Networking team supports...