Good morning AskPerf!  Yesterday we announced the availability of the Windows 8 Consumer Preview (beta) for download/testing.  This is huge for our Client OS business and we encourage you to download and play around with it.  Please see...

Good morning AskPerf world! Jeff Hagler from the Remote Resources team here to chat about printing. How many of you have ever dealt with an issue where you just knew that something was wrong with your print spooler but could not quite put a finger on...

Hello AskPerf Blog Readers! This morning’s post is going to be more of a reference point for all those WMI junkies out there. Have you ever wanted to test WMI using the command line (outside of VBSCRIPT)? If so, then WMIC is the tool for you. In...

Hello AskPerf folks!  This is just a quick blog post to inform you of a great posting from one of our Disk Experts on our Core team.  It is very informative and talks about measuring Physical Disk IO Latency with Perfmon.  Check it out...

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. ...

Hello again AskPerf Blog Readers! Leonard back again to continue Part 2 of our Resource Monitor topic. Today we are going to cover the System Health Report, aka System Diagnostics Report. This report is a combination of data generated through Perfmon...

Good morning AskPerf blog readers! Subheet here from the Windows Performance Team. It’s been a while since I’ve written a BLOG, and am really excited about this one. This time, I’m back with our brand new, much anticipated, WMI troubleshooting...

Hello AskPerf! Leonard with the Performance Team here to discuss the Resource Monitor tool and we can use it to troubleshoot Windows Performance issues. In this blog, (the first of 2 on the subject of underutilized tools) I will discuss Resource Monitor...

Good morning AskPerf! Leonard here to chat about a performance issue we often see on the Windows performance team surrounding SQL and Working Set Trimming. I recently worked an issue on a 2003 SP2 x64 Server, running SQL 2005, that was experiencing periods...

Good day AskPerf! Vinod Rawat here to discuss/demonstrate the benefits of using the Tracelog.exe utility to troubleshoot High CPU issues. Tracelog.exe is a command line utility that allows us to start/stop or enable trace logging, and offers the following...

Hello Askperf! Shamesh Pillai here to discuss an interesting issue I recently worked. On Microsoft Windows Server 2008, 2008 R2 Domain Controllers, Perfmon may fail when starting a System Data Collector Set. This includes the Active Directory Diagnostics...

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...

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...

Good Morning AskPerf Readers! Our theme today is printing, specifically Default Printer selection behavior. We regularly get asked the question on what causes the default printer to change on a Windows host. Understanding the reasons why this change occurs...

Hello AskPerf! Blake here to discuss an internal command line tool called DriverQuery. What exactly is DriverQuery? I’m glad you asked. In a nutshell, DriverQuery is a command line tool that displays a list of all installed device drivers and their...

Hello folks, Pankaj here to show you an interesting way to change the Print Monitors and Processors registry keys with a single PowerShell command. This command can be a timesaver if you have hundreds of 3rd party Print Processors and Monitors on your...

Hello readers,   We have briefly discussed the MmSt pool tag before, but only tangentially. This post is to go much further in depth to the use of this tag and common issues we see related to it. What is the MmSt pool tag? The MmSt pool tag is used...

Many methods of programmatically working with printers exist and I’ll be going over the main ones we use on the Windows platform support teams in this blog. These can be real lifesavers for print server administrators if changes need to be made across...

Hello AskPerf readers. I am Edwin Rocky and this time I am back with some interesting information about the “Allow Logon through Terminal Services” group policy and “Remote Desktop users” group. I am sure many of you are already familiar this GPO and...

On the Windows Performance team we often run into issues with Windows Server 2003 32-bit scaling to support Enterprise workloads. There are a variety of low memory and performance issues that can occur due to the limitations of the 32-bit memory space...

Hi all, Windows Server 2003 x86 systems running Exchange require the use of the /3GB switch in the boot.ini to ensure that there is plenty of address space available for the Store.exe process. In brief, the /3GB switch is used to provide more virtual...

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 while back, I worked on an interesting issue involving RDS EasyPrint. The issue was that the printers from the client were getting redirected in the RDS session using easy print driver. However no print job could be printed to these redirected printers...

com·pat·i·ble       adjective       \kəm-ˈpa-tə-bəl\ : capable of existing together in harmony What is a Shim? A shim is one of the very few four-letter words in use by Microsoft that isn’t an...

Hello all, Back again with the latest list of kb articles published in the month of May 2011. These include articles specific to technologies supported by the Performance Team directly as well as a handful supported by our Core Setup teammates that I...