Good morning AskPerf! We’ve had plenty of discussions in the past about Pool Memory – both Paged and NonPaged. Today we’re going to review how we can determine the Pool Memory usage from a memory dump file via the !poolused command. A quick note – if...

Hello AskPerf! Deepak Kumar here to discuss an emerging issue we’ve been seeing on the front lines that surround Wallpaper deployment to Windows Desktops. We’re going to primarily focus on Windows 7, and may sprinkle a little XP in. With that...

Welcome back AskPerf Readers. In my last post we covered the basics of Network Access Protection (NAP) – what it is, and what it can (and can’t!) do for you. Today we’re going to go over the various components of NAP. The diagram below from the NAP Architecture...

Happy Friday AskPerf!  The Remote Desktop Services team have been busy the last couple of weeks.  There are several new posts on the RDS blog – definitely great weekend reading! Creating Kerberos Identity for RD Session Host Farms Part I: using...

Hello all, this is just a quick reminder that Windows 2000 and Windows XP Service Pack 2 are nearing end-of-support. This applies to both Windows 2000 Server and Windows 2000 Professional, as well as all editions of Windows XP with SP2. On July 13th,...

The future of security baseline management has arrived. The new Security Compliance Manager will enable you to plan, deploy, operate, and manage your organization’s security baselines for Windows® client and server operating systems, and Microsoft applications...

Good morning AskPerf! One of our large call generators that we still see is with PTE depletions on Windows Server 2003 Terminal Servers (x86). Scaling your W2K3 Terminal Server can be challenging as the load increases with additional users and the limits...

In Part One of our Introduction to ActiveX , we covered the basics of ActiveX controls. Today we're going to go over some ActiveX specifics as they relate to the Internet Explorer environment and the management of ActiveX controls. The default installation...

Back in “the old days”, you could use a ball-point pen to break into the debugger .  No, I haven’t stayed too long at the fair – you could use the tip of the ball-point pen to short the nearest pair of pins to create a hardware crash dump. ...

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...

On June 1, 2008 there will be two new Daylight Saving Time changes that go into effect.  Pakistan and Morocco plan to introduce Daylight Saving time.  The governments of the two nations recently announced the change as part of their energy savings...

Hey folks – in the midst of our Windows 7 / Windows Server 2008 R2 Launch Series, we have some information regarding Argentina and the DST change.  Argentina has determined that they will not be observing the DST change on October 18th.  The...

Hello AskPerf! Today we are going to take a brief look at a couple of ways that you can test Task Scheduler to confirm that it is working correctly to weed out other issues. We receive so many calls where the stated issue is “My Scheduled Task does...

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...

There are times when tools such as DebugDiag, ADPlus or UserDump fail to capture a dump when a process terminates unexpectedly.  When that happens, we can launch the process inside the debugger to ensure that we capture a dump.  Here’s how we...

There have been several requests for good IE resources - especially resources pertaining to Internet Explorer 7. The majority of these requests are in reference to three areas - Security, Deployment and Developing for IE7. Bearing in mind that the folks...

Happy Friday AskPerf!  We’ve had a few questions in the past about guidelines for application design in a faster computing environment.  Now, I make absolutely no claims whatsoever to being any sort of a code guru, and so I wasn’t about to try...

Hello AskPerf Blog Readers!  Steven Sinofsky published the below blog last week just in case you missed it.  It was authored by one of our lead Program Managers on the Printing team.  It talks about some of the new exciting Printing features...

Hello AskPerf!  Not sure if you’ve heard about this new feature with Windows 8 Server beta or not, but you can now manage your machines via Windows PowerShell in a web browser.  This means, you can use Windows PowerShell from a large variety...

Good morning AskPerf!  Nabarun here from the Windows Performance Team to discuss the method of allowing RDP access to multiple servers in a flash.  System administrators often want to know how to enable RDP access throughout the domain. ...

Good morning AskPerf! Anshuman Ghosh here to chat about an issue I recently worked where a specific Windows Installer package failed to install on a Windows 2008 R2 Server.  Basic Windows Installer troubleshooting took place, including the ability...

  Introducing the DirectAccess Connectivity Assistant Are you using DirectAccess or planning a deployment soon? Reduce your support costs and significantly improve your mobile users’ connectivity experience with the newly released Microsoft DirectAccess...

Hello AskPerf! Michael Smith here with a quick post on what can cause Win32_QuickFixEngineering to return "No Instances Available". A captured Procmon log while running WMIC QFE or Enumerating Instances with WBEMTEST might reveal something similar to...

Hello AskPerf readers.  My name is Edwin Rocky and this is my first post on the blog. I had recently worked on a case where we noticed that on a Windows Server 2008 R2 machine when we use the Wmic command to set the automatic page file setting to...

Hi all, Windows Server 2008 had a known issue effecting the Fax Service wherein the service would sporadically crash when attempting to route a fax to an email address. This issue was due to a fault with Inetcomm.dll becoming unloaded when it should not...