So, in an attempt to prove that we are at least partially with the times, AskPerf is now on Facebook . Combined with our existing presence on Twitter , we should soon be an unstoppable Internet force (at least among blogs that exist on Technet and have...

Hi all, Paras here.. Starting with Windows Vista, the operating system has implemented a feature where an application that is seen as being unresponsive will ‘ghost’ the window to let you know something is wrong. Once the application recovers, the application...

Hi all, Prabhakar here to discuss how I recently used XPerf to troubleshoot an issue with reduced performance due to Working Set trimming . As you may recall from our previous posts, the trimming of the system Working Set can have a pretty severe impact...

Hello all,   Tim here with a heads-up on an emerging issue that we feel you should be aware of. ESET has recently released an antivirus definition that is experiencing some unintended consequences. The products effected are ESET Smart Security and...

Hello all, Sumesh here once again. With Windows 7 and Windows Vista being widely used these days, we see a lot of requests from customers about legacy application interaction with User Account Control (UAC). A common question is why a legacy application...

Hello all, Devkaran Mawar here, Recently I was working a case with a customer who was running Windows Server 2008 with 160 GB of physical RAM installed. Problem was, about half of the memory was missing in Windows. In Task Manager we could only see 80...

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...

Hi all,   Here on the Performance Team we constantly deal with issues caused by incorrect performance tuning of various servers. This will generally manifest itself in system or process slowness or memory or CPU bottlenecks. I have decided to publish...

A while ago, I got the opportunity to work on an interesting case where the customer’s Explorer process was showing a continuous increase in handle count. Using Process Explorer we could see that these handles were open to various Iexplore.exe processes...

Hello all, Anshuman Ghosh here. A while back, I came across and issue where a customer had a VDI deployment of Windows XP machines running on Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V servers. The problem was that while performance of the virtualized desktops was...

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...

Hello AskPerf Blog readers! We just announced the Beta release of Service Pack 1 (SP1) for Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2. This Service Pack includes all post RTM updates along with a few incremental updates. The SP1 beta will help you:   · Keep your...

Hi all, As discussed in my blog post from way back in January, today is the End of Life for Windows 2000, Windows XP SP2 and Windows Vista RTM support. Below are links to the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor, and both the support lifecycle site as well as recent...

· Hi all, A few years ago, when Windows Server 2008 released, we blogged about some changes made in the operating system to reduce the overall attack surface of installed services on the Server. This was taking changes made in Windows Server Service Pack...

Hello AskPerf readers, Just want to let you know of a new support offering that we are in the process of rolling out. I am sure many of you have contacted Microsoft for support in the past and are aware of our various support offerings. We have Consumer...

Hi all, Paras here once again. It is not uncommon to see application crashes and we all know how frustrating it becomes when an application crashes the moment we try to launch it. To annoy us more it leaves us with very little to go on fix the problem...

Hello AskPerf. This is Mick Bailey from the Performance team in Texas. I've had another customer case inspire a blog post. I hope this information will help some of you out there that are using group policy filtering as described below. The specific case...

Hi all. We are excited to announce the release of the latest version of the Application Compatibility Toolkit, ACT 5.6. As you may remember from our previous posts here and here , ACT is a tool used to analyze applications and hardware, evaluate OS deployments...

Hello Everyone. This is Digvijay once again with a new blog post about my favorite component – Printing. Since the release of Windows 2008 and Windows 2008 R2 there have been several times where we get calls from the customers saying that they...

Good morning AskPerf! Blake here to discuss an internal command line tool called Eventcreate. What exactly is Eventcreate? I’m glad you asked. In a nutshell, Eventcreate is a command line tool that enables an administrator to create a custom event ID...

Hello all. Prabhakar here again, and today I would like to talk about an issue which I recently came across where a user was not able to pull up the detailed description of files on a Windows Server 2008 machine. When the user would right-click a file...

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...

The Component Services snap-in under Administrative Tools allows you manage the COM+ applications on different computers on your network. This is done by adding the computer to a list which is then saved for the next time you open the application. While...

Hi all,   We are posting on a different day that usual to alert you to a potentially painful issue you may already be experiencing. McAfee today identified an issue with DAT file version 5958 detecting a false positive of the w32/wecorl.a virus....

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...