Hello AskPerf! Michael Smith here with a quick post on what can cause Win32_QuickFixEngineering to return "No Instances Available". A captured Procmon log while running WMIC QFE or Enumerating Instances with WBEMTEST might reveal something similar to...

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...

Hello AskPerf! Welcome to day 7 of our Launch Series.  Today we are going to talk about the new Swapfile introduced in Windows 8.  You may ask, “Why do we need another virtual page file?”  Well, with the introduction of the Modern App,...

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...

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...

So today we're going to cover the basics of COM and DCOM. The key word here is basic - if you need to get into a depth discussion about how your custom components are working (or not working in some cases!) and your code, then you should be working with...

Today we are going to briefly go over the basics of some concepts that can be pretty confusing even at the best of times - Sessions, Desktops and Windows Stations. So let's dive right in ... A session consists of all of the processes and other system...

Today we're starting a new series of posts focused on understanding the Windows System Architecture itself. In our first post, we're going to quickly review some basic Windows concepts and terms including a brief overview of the Windows API, Services...

Only a couple of years ago, desktop machines with 4GB of RAM were rare. Only high-end CAD designers and ultra-hardcore gaming enthusiasts were considering, let alone actually installing, 4GB of RAM in their machines. Today however, RAM is much less expensive...

In our previous post on Preparing to Troubleshoot we referred to several different tools and basic troubleshooting questions. In our upcoming posts we will be discussing several troubleshooting techniques, so this seemed like an ideal time to discuss...

Last week, we announced the release of Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) to manufacturing (RTM). Windows XP SP3 includes previously released updates for the OS and also a small number of new updates. The current timeline for XP SP3 availability is as follows...

Day Twelve.  We're almost halfway through our series.  Today we'll continue on with our Printing theme - specifically, Printer-driver packages.  We'll also provide some background on the driver store feature of Windows Vista and Windows...

It's Day Ten of our Windows Server 2008 series.  Seventeen Days to go.  Today we'll be talking about Client-Side Rendering. Client-Side Rendering (CSR) is a new feature that allows print jobs to be fully rendered on the client when targeting...

It's the end of the first week - seven days down and only  twenty more to go.  Today we will take a very brief look at some important enhancements to Memory Management, as well as talk about Dynamic Kernel Address Space, Memory Priorities and...

Troubleshooting High CPU utilization can be addressed from a couple of different standpoints.  In the first instance, you might have a single process consuming CPU - essentially a runaway process.  However, what happens if there is no runaway...

Hi there, this is Mark with the Windows Performance Team. This post is a quick introduction to a new performance tracing tool called XPerf. Moving forward with Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, this powerful tool will hopefully be utilized more often...

Every so often, a customer needs to enable logging on their print queues to capture as much information about print activities on their server.  Configuring the logging options is actually quite an easy administrative task, but there are a couple...

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...

Hey folks, it’s Sakthi Ganesh again.  Today we’re going to talk a little bit about an interesting issue I recently worked on with one of our customers related to MMC Launch failures.  The problem itself had little to do with the MMC’s themselves...

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...

Given that multi-core / multi-processor systems are the way of the future, this might seem like an odd post for us to be writing. However, we have run into a few instances where 32-bit applications run with no issues on single processor systems, but fail...

Hello AskPerf Readers. My name is Mick Bailey, and I am a Support Escalation Engineer on the Performance team in Texas. Recently I was working with a customer on an issue concerning print notifications for Windows Vista, and I thought that the information...

Welcome back folks! It’s Day Eight. We’re just over one-third of the way through our series and there are only two more weeks until launch day! Raise your hand if you’ve ever had to deal with a Print Spooler crash. Keep your hand up...

Good Morning AskPerf!  My name is Bernd Högen and I am a Platforms Escalation Engineer in Germany.  As we discussed in a previous post , PRINTBRM.EXE is the replacement for the now-retired PrintMig 3.1 utility.  PRINTBRM.EXE is located...

Hello AskPerf, my name is Subheet Rastogi and I am a Technical Lead on the Performance team in Bangalore.  Today, we’re going to take a quick look at issues that typically arise when using graphic intensive applications or media streaming in a Remote...