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Summary: Milad Aslaner , a Microsoft Premier Field Engineer based in Germany, gives Login scripts a lashing and encourages us to move on to using Group Policy Preferences. Enjoy! When I’m delivering Microsoft Premier Support Workshops like XPERF View on Windows Client Performance or Supporting...

Summary: Milad Aslaner , a Microsoft Premier Field Engineer (PFE) based in Germany, walks us through how you can activate the .NET Framework 3.5 on Windows 8 when you don’t have access to the Internet. Enjoy! I had to install SQL Server 2012 on my lab computer today. For those of you who...

Ryan Doon , a Microsoft Premier Field Engineer based in Canada, provides us with a consumer-oriented video overview of Microsoft SkyDrive . Catch his excitement as he shows off the various features and functionality that can be leveraged. The video has great nuggets for everyone, including people who...

Summary: Milad Aslaner , a Microsoft Premier Field Engineer based in Germany, walks us through a real-life scenario and lessons learned on how he managed to recover a hard drive that was partially decrypted. Enjoy! Recently a good friend of mine was decrypting the secondary hard drive of his...

Written by Milad Aslaner, Premier Field Engineer. From Germany. How do I actually add a driver to the DriverStore? Hey everyone, this is Milad from Germany. Today I wanted to quickly write about how you can add additional drivers to the DriverStore. All drivers are stored in the so called DriverStore...

SBSL Hotfix Rollup Mark at AskPFEPlat announced the release of a new slow-boot-slow-login (SBSL) hotfix rollup particularly useful for corporate Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 customers: Hey y’all, Mark here with some great news. A massive Slow Boot Slow Login (SBSL) hotfix rollup for enterprises...

Summary:  Milad Aslaner , a Microsoft Premier Field Engineer (still) based in Germany, shares some customer questions around Windows Store app deployment. Recently I was onsite at one of our customers, to discuss Windows Modern Apps. The customer asked for guidance about situations like: how do...

What can be said about Jeff Stokes ( Dude, where’s my PFE!? ) that hasn’t been said before? My money’s on “he’s a beautiful baby sea cucumber.” Actually, I can’t prove that’s never been said, I just suspect not. Strongly. Anyway, Jeff wants you to be able to squeeze even more virtual desktops into your...

Mike Rosado demonstrates the new Fixit Center Pro tool at AskPFEPlat , which incorporates our latest support diagnostic tools, which replace the venerable MPSReports utilities (which collected data quite efficiently, but didn’t analyze that data). For many years, Microsoft Commercial Technical Support...

Well, I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like. And I like it when the boots are short and punchy! Jeff continues to tell you everything we know: This time, it’s what the goal state of any boot optimization process should look like: a beautiful, fast boot. It’s what you...

Get the impression that PFE work with performance a lot? Well, we do. We try to ensure that whatever we’re thrown at is as optimized as it can be in the time available to us. Not content to talk about current versions of Windows, Jeff takes a dive down memory lane to cover XP startup and logon performance...

How long do your enterprise desktops take to boot up to a usable state? 2 minutes? 3? 5? 10? Does this impact business productivity? Has your organization had a WDRAP (if not, then why not)? Is it all about boot times and logon times, or does it go beyond that? Are some systems sluggish all the time...

He was a skeptic, but Senior Microsoft Premier Field Engineer Jeff Stokes has determined that Windows Performance Analyzer (WPA) , a component of the Windows Performance Toolkit (downloadable here ), offers a level of depth and insight not currently available with the classic Visual Trace Analysis tool...

Lately, the last year or two, I’ve been slowly drawn (moth to flame almost) into the remediation of the problem state of Windows slow boot or slow logon conditions. Interestingly enough, Microsoft Premier Field Engineering management allows (and ...read more

Written by Richard Case, Premier Field Engineer. This is the first article in a series of blog posts on collecting Microsoft Windows memory dumps for specific scenarios. Each part will detail some of the tools and techniques that can be used to capture a memory dump for that scenario. These scenarios...

Written by Mark Farrugia, Senior Microsoft Premier Field Engineer. Please note that the following post is all based on beta software, and all features are subject to possible change upon official release. I have done a number of posts around BitLocker, and today I would like to add one more.  Some...

Written by Mark Farrugia, Senior Microsoft Premier Field Engineer. There are many volume encryption technologies out there, and some of these are now taking advantage of technology that Microsoft BitLocker has been using from its inception.  The Trusted Platform Module (TPM) chip is a micro-computer...

Written by Mark Farrugia, Senior Microsoft Premier Field Engineer. Mobile computers (Laptops, Netbooks, Tablets, etc.) have been outselling desktop computers for years now, and why shouldn’t they?  Some modern day laptops offer better 3D Gaming frame rates than desktop computer counterparts. ...

Written by Cheng Pei Koay, Microsoft Premier Field Engineer. Here’s my quick list of 4 tools that should be in the arsenal of anyone who’s troubleshooting high-CPU usage situations on Windows systems. 1) User Mode Process Dumper The User Mode Process Dumper dumps any running Win32 processes memory image...

Written by Mark Farrugia, Microsoft Premier Field Engineer. Recently I was asked an interesting question from one of my customers: “What is Microsoft’s recommended practice around using Logon Scripts versus using Group Policy ?” To my knowledge, Microsoft doesn’t provide a lot of guidance with respect...

Written by Mark Farrugia, Senior Microsoft Premier Field Engineer . Most computer end-users thinks that if they’re running antivirus software then their safe from all the malicious users out on the internet. People feel their antivirus software is the first and last line of defense in the ongoing battle...

Care of our friends over at Run As Radio , Clint Huffman talks to Richard Campbell and Greg Hughes about Performance Analysis of Logs (PAL) 2.0 ,  a tool that saves you time by automating the analysis of Windows performance monitor (perfmon) logs. PAL makes the performance counters in perfmon far...

Written by Mark Farrugia, a Senior Microsoft Premier Field Engineer based in Canada. I was once told that the best system administrators are usually the laziest people. I didn’t take that statement seriously until I gave it some thought and started taking into consideration that it does in fact hold...

Written by Mark Farrugia, Senior Microsoft Premier Field Engineer For my follow up article to How to use Windows 7 to lock down removable media and keep your computer safe , I would like to discuss another feature within Windows 7 Enterprise and Ultimate editions that both individuals and enterprises...

Care of our friends over at Run As Radio , Jeff Stokes talks with Richard Campbell about Xperf, which is part of a suite of tools called the Windows Performance Analysis Toolkit (WPT). WPT digs into Windows where PerfMon leaves off by using Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) to see exactly how applications...