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Hi all, Some of the most difficult issues we face here on the Performance Team are WMI related issues. WMI is very pervasive, and when it breaks, you can experience a myriad of symptoms that are often very difficult to troubleshoot and fix. Here are a few examples of the symptoms that can occur, and...

Hi all, and welcome to Day 21 in our Windows 7 / Windows Server 2008 R2 Launch Series. Tomorrow is the big day! To wrap up our Launch Series, I want to talk today about a really cool tool included in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 called Problem Steps Recorder . I am sure we have all had situations...

Hello AskPerf Readers! Day Twenty … only a couple more days to go! The excitement is building. Today we are going to take a very quick look at the new and powerful addition of Federated Search in Windows 7. Federated Search expands the ability of search beyond the users PC and is all about simple lightweight...

Welcome back to our Launch Series. It’s Day Fourteen which means that there’s just over a week to go! Today we’re continuing on with our look at various Remote Desktop Services components. Our subject: RemoteApp and Desktop Connection. In Windows Server 2008 , RemoteApp was introduced to deploy RDS applications...

Happy Friday everyone!  Welcome to Day Nine of our Launch Series for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.  We’re continuing on with Printing today – specifically a look at PrintBRM.  PrintBRM was introduced in Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 as the replacement for the PrintMig utility...

Welcome back folks! It’s Day Eight. We’re just over one-third of the way through our series and there are only two more weeks until launch day! Raise your hand if you’ve ever had to deal with a Print Spooler crash. Keep your hand up if the problem was caused by a faulty driver. Keep...

Welcome to Day 7 of our Launch Series for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.  We’re continuing on with our coverage of Printing and Document services – today’s topic is the Print Management Console (PMC) and the enhancements in the new operating system(s).  This isn’t an especially long...

Welcome back to our Windows 7 / Windows Server 2008 Launch Series.  Day Six and we’re going strong.  Today we’re going to switch our focus today from the Core OS to Printing, beginning with a brief overview of What’s New in Printing and some Printing Performance Enhancements.  We’ll be...

Happy Monday everyone.  It’s Day Five of our Launch Series.  Today, we’re going to cover a new feature in Windows 7 / Windows Server 2008 R2 – Console Host (ConHost.exe).  A good number of companies and individuals out there still run “console” applications.  A console application...

Welcome back AskPerf!  It’s Day Four of our pre-launch series.  Even though it’s Sunday here, we’re not letting up at all – we’re feverishly working to get the rest of our series completed!  Today’s topic is the new Unified Background Process Manager (UBPM).   Historically, Windows...

Welcome to Day Three of our pre-launch series.  Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 have many features that are geared toward reducing power consumption.  In order to achieve greater power savings by processors, they must be able to idle more often and, when they are idle, stay idle for long...

Hello, and welcome to our second post in the Windows 7 launch series. This post is going to be a long one, so buckle in. We’re going to start with an overview of Fault Tolerant Heap, which is a new feature in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 and then go over some Memory Management pieces. If you...

On October 6th, Benjamin Gray from independent analyst firm Forrester will be discussing his April 2009 report, “Get Ready for Windows 7” and whether or not your organization should deploy Windows 7 now or test applications and hardware against Windows Vista for greater Windows 7 compatibility. Some...

Happy Friday AskPerf!  No, that’s not a typo in the title, the NET PRINT functionality no longer exists in Windows 7.  The decision to deprecate the functionality was based on usage data and the fact that there were multiple ways to perform the same tasks.  Before we go over new ways to...

Happy Friday AskPerf Readers.  We’re taking a quick break from our debugging series today, because we thought you might enjoy reading this post on the Windows 7 blog.  Here’s an excerpt to whet your appetite … This has been a busy couple of days for a few of us on the team as we had a report...

OK folks – here are some details on RTM availability. Availability depends on who you are. The information below is from the Windows Team Blog : Partners & OEM’s ISV and IHV partners will be able to download Windows 7 RTM from Microsoft Connect or MSDN on August 6th Microsoft Partner...

Good Morning AskPerf!  Today’s post is a bit of a departure from what we normally discuss, but since this past Sunday was Father’s Day, I thought this might be an interesting topic to share.  Actually, this conversation came up while I was having lunch with my parents.  My daughters are...

On June 18th, Mark Russinovich will be hosting a Virtual Roundtable on Windows 7 Application Compatibility. This is a chance for IT Pros to learn all about Windows 7 Application Compatibility and get answers to any management or deployment questions for Windows 7. You can submit your performance questions...

In case you missed the announcement on Tuesday from the Windows team , Windows 7 will be in stores starting on October 22nd – just in time for the Holidays!  Now, the Windows team haven’t publicly discussed their plans for international releases yet, so I suspect that the October 22nd date is a...

Good Morning folks!  More news on Windows 7 and the availability of the official Release Candidate.  We now have some dates that we can share with you.  The RC build is slated to be available for download by MSDN / TechNet subscribers this Thursday (April 30, 2009).  Broader, public...

Hey folks – more Windows 7 goodness today.  With the Windows 7 Release Candidate on the horizon (no, I still don’t have a date or a build number to share) many more folks will be testing out Windows 7.  In testing scenarios where you may wind up installing, re-installing and upgrading builds...

APPLICATION COMPATIBILITY TOOLKIT (ACT) Description: Description: The Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT) enables software developers, independent software vendors (ISVs), and IT professionals who work in a corporate environment to determine, before rolling out within the organization, whether...

Today’s post is actually from my personal troubleshooting experiences last week.  I have been playing with Windows 7 quite a bit recently.  I upgraded my primary work system, my laptop and my home system to the Windows 7 build that was released at PDC in October .  Last weekend, I decided...

If you were one of the attendees at the Microsoft Professional Developer’s Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles last week, then you walked away with the Milestone 3 (M3) build of Windows 7.  The M3 build isn’t even a full Beta build – it’s pre-Beta ! Now, I can’t tell you when a public Beta version will...

It occurred to me that with so many technical blogs out there, that it might be useful to bring you some posts from our fellow bloggers here at Microsoft that have been published recently … If you haven’t been keeping up with our colleagues over at the Terminal Services blog, then you may have missed...