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Happy Friday AskPerf.  My name is Syed Yusuf, and I am a Support Engineer on the Performance team.  Application crash issues can be somewhat tricky to resolve – especially if we’re dealing with a third party application.  Today we’re going to take a look a the Application Verifier tool...

Good Morning AskPerf.  My name is Philip Demaree and I am an Escalation Engineer based in Washington.  Today we’re going to take a look at some Printing and Active Directory concepts and troubleshooting.  To start with, what we’re going to do is look at the output from LDIFDE for one of...

Hello AskPerf Readers. My name is Mick Bailey, and I am a Support Escalation Engineer on the Performance team in Texas. Recently I was working with a customer on an issue concerning print notifications for Windows Vista, and I thought that the information might be useful to some other folks out there...

Hello AskPerf. Happy New Year! My name is Gangadharan Prashanth and we’re going to kick off 2009 with a quick look at WMI Namespace Security and a common error message that we see when running the WMI Diagnosis Utility (WMIDiag). When running WMIDiag, we often see an alert that looks something like this...

Back when I was a Systems Administrator, one of my roles was to review the system configuration for a server prior to its implementation in the production environment.  We had a fairly streamlined process for server deployment – including scripts to verify the security hardening, installed software...

Last year, we discussed using the WMI Diagnosis Utility in a post on Basic WMI Testing .  We’ve certainly noticed that more than a few of our customers are running the utility before contacting us, which certainly helps us in our troubleshooting.  However, in the last couple of months, we’ve...

Hello AskPerf readers!  My name is Don Geddes, and I am a Support Escalation Engineer on the Performance team.  Over the last couple of months, we’ve been getting quite a few calls on a new popup dialog box that occurs when connecting to a web site that hosts Terminal Services connections or...

On September 24th, Mark Russinovich will be hosting a Virtual Roundtable on Windows Vista Performance. Mark and a panel of industry experts will be discussing several issues related to Windows Vista including: Overall OS Performance Common Misconfigurations Boot times Applets Disk Performance...

We deal with application and service issues on a daily basis.  Normally the problems relate to applications not performing as expected, hanging or crashing.  However, every so often someone will ask us what network port a service is using.  Unless we are talking about one of the well known...

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. XPerf is part of the Windows Performance Toolkit...

Following on from our last Two Minute Drill, today's topic is the RELOG.EXE utility.  RELOG.EXE creates new performance logs from data in existing performance logs by changing the sampling rate and / or converting the file format.  RELOG.EXE is not a new tool - it is however one of those tools...

Today we are going to talk about the new Reliability Monitor feature in Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. In a nutshell, the Reliability Monitor shows you your system stability history at a glance and lets you see details on a day-by-day basis about events that impact reliability. Reliability...

Although the bulk of Group Policy Processing and Troubleshooting is handled by our Directory Services team, we often collaborate on these issues - mainly when the issue relates to a user logging in and not being presented with their desktop environment as they would expect.  Instead they are simply...

Welcome back.  After our series of posts on Windows Server 2008, today we're going to switch gears a little bit and look at WMI Logging.  We often get calls from customers regarding WMI issues beyond the Permissions or Impersonation Rights problems that we've discussed in previous posts. ...

Welcome to Day Fifteen of our series on Windows Server 2008.  There's only twelve more days until Launch Day.  Today we will be continuing on with Terminal Services, specifically the Management and Administration components. There are several tools and methods that can be used to configure...

It's the end of the first week - seven days down and only  twenty more to go.  Today we will take a very brief look at some important enhancements to Memory Management, as well as talk about Dynamic Kernel Address Space, Memory Priorities and I/O Handling.  So let's dive right in ... The...

In previous posts we've discussed the basics of memory management including an overview of kernel and user memory , pool resources as well as the /3GB switch .   Continuing our discussion of memory management, we are going to examine an issue that we have been seeing more of on the Performance...

It's been a while since we posted something on Application Compatibility and Windows Vista. A question I get from quite a few customers when discussing application compatibility is, "What is the Program Compatibility Assistant used for?" Today we are going to cover some common installation and runtime...

Back in June, we published our post on Basic WMI Testing . Today we're going to go over some common issues and ways that you can troubleshoot and recover from them - specifically rights and permissions. We're not going to get into troubleshooting scripts - what we're looking at is troubleshooting WMI...

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 Synchronization. The heap manager supports concurrent...

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 that has been around since the days of Windows...

One of our common issues is troubleshooting application crashes (for example, the Print Spooler or a third-party application). These crashes usually result in the infamous Dr. Watson error. First, let's discuss terminology. A crash is when something experiences a fault and has no choice but to exit....

When I first started in the IT industry (back in the Windows for Workgroups 3.11 days), one of my team leads told me at least once every other day, "If you ever decide to start editing the registry directly, you'd better be sure you know what you're doing." That may have been one of the most valuable...

Tabbed browsing is a new feature in Internet Explorer 7. One question we are frequently asked by administrators is - "How do I control the tab behavior for my users to present a consistent experience?" We are also asked the same thing by developers who want to leverage this functionality for their applications...

Here’s a scenario that we’ve seen recently that some customers neglect when it comes to the DST update: Terminal Server clients connecting to a Windows Server 2003 Terminal Server. A very common Terminal Services deployment involves Microsoft Office 2003 installed on Terminal Servers with users connecting...