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...

In our last post, we talked about Pages and Page Tables.  Today, we’re going to take a look at one of the most common problems when dealing with virtual memory – the Page Fault.  A page fault occurs when a program requests an address on a page...

Hello there! My name is Mike and I am an Escalation Engineer with the Platforms team. I’ve been reading the AskPerf blog for a while and wanted to share some information about a very useful troubleshooting tool. A quick word of warning though – to really...

Hi AskPerf readers, Don Geddes here again.  Today we’re going to look at Windows Error Reporting logging in Windows Server 2008 and how it can affect the Printing subsystem.  There was a KB article written a while back that discussed the Windows...

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 ...

Hello AskPerf – my name is Digvijay Nath, and I’m a Support Engineer on the Performance team in our Bangalore office.  Today, I’m going to quickly cover the .MSP file used by the Windows Installer.  The installer uses different file types to...

Good Morning AskPerf!  Today we’re going to wrap up our series on Task Scheduler Changes in Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008.  If you haven’t read my previous posts on Task Scheduler, I highly recommend reading those first.  The two...

Hello folks, Prabhakar Shettigar here once more with another odd case from the trenches. Recently my colleague Sumesh wrote about how Not All Systems Are Truly Equal . Following on from his post, I thought I’d share some interesting anecdotes about a...

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...

Hello AskPerf!  My name is Satyajit and I am a Support Engineer on the Performance team.  Today we’re going to discuss the use of a very useful Windows SysInternals tools named Autoruns that we can use to examine programs that start during the...

Hey folks, it’s Yong Rhee once more.  Today’s post is a short, but an important one for Print Server administrators.  If you’ve ever administered a Print Server, the chances are that you’ve probably had to perform a print server migration as...

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...

I am sure we have all seen access violations occur since we took ownership of our first x86 PC's.  The infamous "Bluescreen", application crashes, it doesn't really matter, access violations are all over the place.  For any of you...

Welcome back!  If you're just returning from a weekend, hopefully you got some time to yourself to relax.  It's Day Eleven of our Windows Server 2008 Series.  Today's topic - the new WSD Port Monitor. The WSD Port Monitor is a new printer...

In prior versions of Windows, especially if the installation had many applications installed over the years, it was not easy to run a program or navigate the system shortly after booting.  I remember fighting with my mouse or looking over at the...

It's Day Twenty-Four. Only three more days until Launch Day! Our Windows Server 2008 series continues today with an overview of Terminal Server Session Broker. Terminal Server Session Broker (TS Session Broker) is a role service in Windows Server 2008...

In Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and earlier versions of the Windows operating system, all services run in the same session as the first user who logs on to the console. This session is called Session 0. Running services and user applications together...

We often have to work with customers to understand why a specific IE scenario fails. In some instances we may have to enable some custom logging and data collection to get to the root cause. However, understanding why we are doing what we are doing is...

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...

Good morning AskPerf! Kapil Patry here from the Microsoft Platforms Support Team. I am blogging today about an issue I recently worked. This particular issue dealt with the creation of a task using Task Scheduler on a Windows 2008 R2 Server (can occur...

A new printing hotfix rollup was released that updates the core print spooler components localspl.dll, splwow64.exe, spoolsv.exe, win32spl.dll, and Winprint.dll.  This rollup is designed to reduce known issues such as printing performance, print...

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...

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...

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...

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...