Starting on May 21, the Windows client team, along with Office and Microsoft Learning will unite to bring the Get On the Bus Tour back home to North America! This is a chance for IT pros to learn all about Windows 7 and Office 2010 , and focus...

  Hi all, Anshuman here with an issue I ran into recently where a customer’s Windows XP machine was loading the standard VGA driver and gave a maximum display resolution of 640x480. The event log showed the following event after boot:   Event...

Hi all. Today I would like to bring to your attention an issue we have been seeing lately that very well may effect those of you in a corporate environment. McAfee has recently released information about this issue on their web site . The issue is that...

  Hello all, Ashish here with a brief discussion about an issue you may have seen when using Perfmon to monitor system performance. When you use Perfmon to monitor multiple instances of the same process, you have probably noticed that it differentiates...

Hi folks! It’s been a long time since I wrote the Terminal Services and Graphically Intensive Applications post. Today’s post is a short one; we will be discussing a curious case of Event ID: 56 on Windows Server 2008/R2 with the Remote Desktop Services...

Hello AskPerf readers. My name is Randy Grogan and this is my first post on this blog. If you are familiar with some of the Printing Improvements in Windows Server 2008 R2 then you may already know how much easier it is to Delegate Printer Management...

Hi folks! Satyajit here with a brief discussion of a very useful tool. You may have had the need to run a Performance Monitor log at one time or another, but noticed that a needed counter was missing from the list. This can occur if the counter has been...

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...

  Introducing the DirectAccess Connectivity Assistant Are you using DirectAccess or planning a deployment soon? Reduce your support costs and significantly improve your mobile users’ connectivity experience with the newly released Microsoft DirectAccess...

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...

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...

Today I would like to do a quick walkthrough of the VMMap tool from Windows Sysinternals . This tool gives us a neat summary of a process’ virtual and physical memory usage. It shows a graphical summary as well as a detailed report of a given process...

Hello AskPerf! Blake here again with another informative AskPerf Blog post. Today we are going to take a brief look at some of the new features in Windows PowerShell 2.0. As you may or may not know, PowerShell 2.0 is now included in Windows 7 and Windows...

Hello all, this is just a quick reminder that Windows 2000 and Windows XP Service Pack 2 are nearing end-of-support. This applies to both Windows 2000 Server and Windows 2000 Professional, as well as all editions of Windows XP with SP2. On July 13th,...

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...

There often arises a need to figure out what may have changed on a system, either due to a specific issue or even to compare the difference between two systems. Today I would like to introduce you to the Windows System State Analyzer utility. Unless you...

The Remote Desktop Services (Terminal Services) Team Blog has posted an interesting write-up pertaining to Virtual Desktop Pool; check it out:   http://blogs.msdn.com/rds/archive/2010/01/04/virtual-desktop-pool.aspx Tim Newton   Share this post...

  Hello all, happy New Year and welcome back from the holidays. I recently worked a case involving intermittent COM+ corruption, and resetting security permissions would alleviate the issue for a period of several weeks. As I am sure you can imagine...

The end of the year is upon us.  It seems as though 2009 went by in a blur.  It has definitely been a busy year for us though - and not just on the Performance team.  We've had some tremendous product launches across Microsoft as a whole...

Assuming you have read the last post, you are now aware that CC is moving on to greener pastures, or at least a different pasture in the same building. I will be doing my best to take up the reins of the blog and continue to deliver helpful content to...

From everyone here on the Performance team - Happy Thanksgiving! XJYEX78Z6WAT

Happy Friday AskPerf! I'm sure you've already surmised by the title of the post that today's topic is a somewhat bittersweet one. XE3E9MT8HW5V It is said that all good things must come to an end. In that same vein, the one constant about working at...

Good morning folks!  Sorry that today’s post is a little later than usual.  We’ve been tracking an issue related to Microsoft Security Bulletin MS09-065 ( KB Article 969947 ) on Windows XP.  You may notice odd behavior including system...

Happy Friday AskPerf!  We’ve had a few questions in the past about guidelines for application design in a faster computing environment.  Now, I make absolutely no claims whatsoever to being any sort of a code guru, and so I wasn’t about to try...

Good morning all – today’s post is a very brief one regarding new announcements concerning Remote Desktop Services.  The original announcements were made on the Remote Desktop ServicesTeam blog . RDS CAL Single Pack now available in Retail channel...