It's February 1, 2008. Only twenty-six more days until Windows Server 2008 is released to the world. With that in mind, we have twenty-six posts lined up between now and February 27 covering areas of Windows Server 2008 that contain both general information...

It's Day Two of our series of Windows Server 2008 posts. Only twenty-five more days to go till the big launch. Today's topics are Startup Processes and Delayed Automatic Start for System Services. In previous versions of Windows, during system boot...

It's Day Nine of our Windows Server 2008 series.  We're one-third of the way through our series.  Today we will continue on with our look at printing in Windows Server 2008.  Our topic today - XML Paper Specification (XPS) Support. The...

Day Twenty-Five. It's Monday morning - hopefully those of you returning from your weekends got some time to rest and relax. Only two days to go until the launch of Windows Server 2008. Today we're going to continue on from yesterday's post on Terminal...

Welcome to Day Number Twenty-Six.  Tomorrow is Launch Day!  Over the last twenty-five days we've gone over several different aspects of Windows Server 2008.  Just because today is the last day in our Launch Series doesn't mean that we're...

Back In October, we wrote a post regarding the Event ID 333 Errors and how to troubleshoot them .  At the end of that post, we mentioned the "Lock Pages in Memory" user right.  One of the things we mentioned was that if you have an...

Today we're going to discuss IE Group Policies. If you're unfamiliar with Group Policies, I highly recommend that you read our earlier post on the Basics of Group Policies . When dealing with IE group policies, there are two types of settings to consider...

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...

Happy Friday AskPerf! Today’s post is a quick overview of the new MPS Reports tool that was released last week. For those of you that have worked on support incidents with us in the past, you’re used to downloading multiple flavors of the MPS Reports...

Hello again AskPerf!  Blake Morrison here to introduce you to a new tool from Sysinternals called ProcDump.  If you are familiar with AdPlus then ProcDump will be a welcome addition to your debugging arsenal.  ProcDump is a new command...

Hello AskPerf readers.  My name is Scott McArthur and  I am a Support Escalation Engineer with the Setup & Cluster team.  I know you’re probably thinking that one of us has somehow found our way to the wrong blog!  I recently ran...

Here on the Performance Team, we recently had a discussion about the pains associated with viewing exported Event Log (.evt) files from Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 on a Windows Vista machine. In order to increase the usability of these files within...

This is in continuation of the topic discussed by John Dickson in his blog post entitled Installing Windows Vista Print Drivers on Windows Server 2003 http://blogs.technet.com/askperf/archive/2008/09/19/installing-windows-vista-print-drivers-on-windows...

Good morning AskPerf! Digvijay here to chat about print server migration. All server admins have probably had an opportunity to migrate print servers. This process can be fast and easy when migrating between the same versions of operating systems; and...

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 again AskPerf! Blake here to show you a not-so-utilized command line tool called Schtasks. The Schtasks command enables an administrator to create, delete, query, change, run, and end Scheduled Tasks on your local or remote system. For those command...

Previously, my colleague Jeff demonstrated the power of Scriptomatic 2.0 . To recap, Scriptomatic is a tool that helps you write scripts to query WMI classes and gather management information. Today we introduce to you the WMI Code Creator tool, similar...

In recent months we have seen an increasing volume of print cluster cases being opened due to poor performance. For example slow failover or spooler crashes. This article is provided as a guide for print server administrators to identify and resolve possible...

Hello everyone, I’d like to introduce myself. My name is Ray Ackley and I’m a Support Escalation Engineer in the Performance specialty. I’d like to talk a bit about a new tool that allows us to examine a vital performance resource: physical memory. This...

OK - following on from our recent WMI Architecture post, let's start digging into some Basic WMI Troubleshooting. There's a lot of material to cover, so this is going to be a multi-part series! It's important to note that these are general concepts and...

Here's an issue we've been seeing more and more of on the Performance team lately concerning SQL 2005 and Memory Management. The issue gets reported as: "Windows Memory Management is trimming the SQL Working Set." When you review the event logs, you'll...

On Windows Vista, Internet Explorer 7 runs in Protected Mode, which can help protect users from attack by running the Internet Explorer process with greatly restricted privileges. Protected Mode significantly reduces the ability of an attack to write...

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...

We’ve covered different pieces of WMI in previous posts, but we have yet to discuss the Windows Management Instrumentation Command-Line (WMIC) in detail.  The WMIC provides administrators easy access to the WMI infrastructure.  Prior to...

Day Eighteen is upon us.  We are two-thirds of the way through our series of posts.  Today we'll be doing a brief overview of the new Remote Desktop Connection (RDC) Client 6.x.  We've discussed several new features in Terminal Services...