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...

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 again, Aamer Shedam here. I have recently come across a Windows 7 behavior, that while it is intentional and is meant to ease printer management, may be less than intuitive to many. The behavior is that if you install multiple printers that use...

There's only three weeks to go till Launch Day.  Today, we're going to talk about the Dynamic Link Library (DLL) Loader and Address Space Load Randomization.  In Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, when talking about process and thread creation...

Last week, while planning blog posts for April, it occurred to me that although we had provided information on using the /3GB switch in the boot.ini file on Windows Server 2003, we hadn’t followed up with a post about how to implement this same functionality...

In our previous post on PCA, we discussed several runtime issue detection scenarios. Today, we are going to examine some program startup scenarios (specifically application blocking) and discuss the management of the Program Compatibility Assistant. Let...

Hello AskPerf readers, it’s Don Geddes again and I’m back with that post that I promised you about that pesky dialog box that we all know so well. In this post, I’m going to walk through some common client/server scenarios and explain the technical details...

On Tuesday, we talked about Heap - what it is and how it works. Today we're going to continue our look at Heap. At the end of the last post we mentioned Look-Aside Lists and Low Fragmentation Heap. But before we dive into those, let's take a look at Heap...

In our last post, we looked at some common memory issues and how to troubleshoot them.  Today we're going to go over excessive paging and memory bottlenecks. We've talked about issues with the page file in several posts - something to bear in mind...

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...

Hello all, Shipra here with a brief discussion of the various tools available to remotely shut down a system, and which is appropriate to use under which circumstances. The first is Shutdown.exe , which originally shipped with the Windows 2000 Resource...

Hello AskPerf!  Harshad Joshi here from the Performance team.  Today we are going to talk about changing the “Region and Language” settings for all users at once.  Typically, you change these settings on a per user basis.  Well, we...

Today we are looking at a couple of new changes/additions to the Task Scheduler service in Windows Vista and Server 2008.  As an overview, the Task Scheduler service provides controlled, unattended management of task execution, launched either on...

Day Five ... only twenty-two more days to go till Launch Day.  On the menu today - Windows Error Reporting. Starting with Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista SP1, Windows Error Reporting (WER) can be configured to collect full user-mode dump files...

Recently, I've had several engineers ask me about disabling of the Advanced Print Features as a troubleshooting step.  I sat down with one of our print developers to talk about the Advanced Print Features - what they do and why they are useful. ...

Hello AskPerf readers!  My name is Don Geddes, and I am a Support Escalation Engineer on the Performance team.  Over the last couple of months, we’ve been getting quite a few calls on a new popup dialog box that occurs when connecting to a web...

Today we're going to start looking at Clustered Print Servers. Clustering itself tends to intimidate many administrators, especially newer administrators. Much of the fear factor usually stems from being unfamiliar with how clustering works, and the fact...

Good morning AskPerf! There are several issues that have been associated with a high number of inactive Terminal Server ports. Delayed logon times to RDP sessions, failure of printers to redirect, and slow server performance due to registry bloat from...

It’s day 13 of our Launch Series and we are nearing the finish line. Today we are going to look at ways to print from your Modern UI Apps. So you have loaded Windows 8, and need to print from one of the new Modern Apps that have installed, but...

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...

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...

Good Morning AskPerf Nation! Our Launch Series is at Day Seventeen. There are only five more days to go! Today we’re continuing on with Remote Desktop Services, with a look at Remote Desktop Services Virtualization (or RDS-V, for short). You may also...

We are often asked about the centralized management of Internet Explorer configuration options for which there are no Group Policy settings included with the default IE GPO templates. One of the settings that we are asked about the most is the "Launching...

This is a follow-up to our Processes consuming high amounts of virtual memory post from January. Pagefile issues are something we deal with frequently on the Performance Team. We have had several cases in the past few months of customers reporting pagefile...

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...