This case was shared with me by a friend of mine, Andrew Richards, a Microsoft Exchange Server Escalation Engineer. It’s a really interesting case because it highlights the use of a Sysinternals tool I specifically wrote for use by Microsoft support...

While I long for the day when I no longer experience the effects of buggy software, there’s something rewarding about solving my own troubleshooting cases. In the process, I often come up with new techniques to add to my bag of tricks and to share...

The most interesting cases I receive are those that demonstrate a unique troubleshooting technique or uncover an interesting root cause. I received this one recently that has both characteristics. The case opened when a systems administrator got a report...

Last time , I covered the limits and how to measure usage of one of the two key window manager resources, USER objects. This time, I’m going to cover the other key resource, GDI objects. As always, I recommend you read the previous posts before this one...

So far in the Pushing the Limits of Windows series, I’ve focused on resources managed by the Windows operating system kernel, including physical and virtual memory, paged and nonpaged pool, processes, threads and handles. In this and the next post, however...

Emails containing troubleshooting cases keep arriving in my inbox. I’ve received many cases that start with a seemingly unsolvable problem and end a few steps later with a solution or - often just as useful - a workaround. I’ve amassed several hundred...

On November 3 2009, Sysinternals retired NewSID , a utility that changes a computers machine Security Identifier (machine SID). I wrote NewSID in 1997 (its original name was NTSID) because the only tool available at the time for changing machine SIDs...

Windows 7 hit general availability today, putting it in stores and on new PC’s. There are plenty of beneath-the-surface changes that make Windows 7 more power efficient, scalable, secure and responsive (and of course, there are lots of user-visible features...

I wanted to update you on my recent and upcoming speaking engagements. First, I’ve been hosting a series of virtual roundtables for the Springboard Series program. Springboard’s purpose is to provide a one-stop resource for IT Pros evaluating, deploying...

This is the fifth post in my Pushing the Limits of Windows series where I explore the upper bound on the number and size of resources that Windows manages, such as physical memory, virtual memory, processes and threads. Here’s the index of the entire...

Microsoft Customer Support Services (CSS) is one of the biggest customers of the Sysinternals tools and they often send me interesting cases they’ve solved with them. This particular case is especially interesting because it affected a large number of...

This is the fourth post in my Pushing the Limits of Windows series that explores the boundaries of fundamental resources in Windows. This time, I’m going to discuss the limits on the maximum number of threads and processes supported on Windows. I’ll briefly...

I’m proud to announce that Windows Internals, 5th Edition is now available. It’s been a long road, but a writing a book of this scope is an incredibly detailed endeavor. This new edition covers Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 (32-bit and 64-bit...

A couple of weeks ago I participated for the first time in the keynote at Microsoft’s Teched US conference to a room of over 5,000 attendees. Bill Veghte, the Senior Vice President of Windows marketing, led the keynote and gave a tour of the user-focused...

In previous Pushing the Limits posts, I described the two most basic system resources, physical memory and virtual memory . This time I’m going to describe two fundamental kernel resources, paged pool and nonpaged pool, that are based on those, and that...

A few weeks ago, my wife mentioned that she sometimes saw files in her desktop folder that didn’t appear on the actual desktop. She brought it up not only because she was confused by the discrepancy, but because she wanted to move some of these phantom...

David Solomon , my coauthor for the Windows Internals books, was recently in the middle of an important VOIP call on Skype when the audio suddenly garbled. A second later the system blue screened. He called back after the reboot, but a half hour later...

In my first Pushing the Limits of Windows post , I discussed physical memory limits, including the limits imposed by licensing, implementation, and driver compatibility. Here’s the index of the entire Pushing the Limits series. While they can stand on...

A few weeks ago my wife complained that her Vista desktop was not responding to her typing or mouse clicks. Given the importance of the customer, I immediately sat down at the system to troubleshoot. It wasn’t completely hung, but extremely sluggish....

I haven't had a chance to write a new post in a while because I've been busy working on Windows, new Sysinternals tools and enhancements to existing ones, and the 5th edition of Windows Internals, so I thought that I'd update you on my speaking schedule...

This is the first blog post in a series I'll write over the coming months called Pushing the Limits of Windows that describes how Windows and applications use a particular resource, the licensing and implementation-derived limits of the resource, how...

When I experienced a crash in Internet Explorer (IE) on my home 64-bit gaming system one day, I chalked it up to random third-party plug-in memory corruption. I moved on, but a few days later had another crash in IE. Then, Windows Media Player (WMP) started...

Welcome to the first guest "Case Of" blog post! I've received numerous great troubleshooting cases over the last two months and have selected this one, submitted by Troy Wolbrink, a corporate web master, as the first to share with you. Troy ran into a...

As you’ve probably surmised by my blog posts and other writings, I like knowing exactly what my systems are doing. I want to know if a process is running away with the CPU, causing memory pressure, or hitting the disk. Besides keeping my computers running...

Windows Vista SP1 includes a number of enhancements over the original Vista release in the areas of application compatibility, device support, power management, security and reliability. You can see a detailed list of the changes in the Notable Changes...