Perf PFE Jeff Stokes provides some simple steps that should produce a good boot trace for a Windows 7 machine. You have a Windows 7 host that you want to collect a trace from.  A good trace.  One that you know other people will be able to decipher...

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...

Pedro Azevedo Lopes shares his prescription for a better-looking SQL Server in his post About Maintenance Plans – grooming SQL Server : I admit I’m not a big fan of Maintenance Plans (the feature that goes by that name) mainly because of its “do or die...

In a follow-up to his popular post on How To Create Video Games Using PowerShell , Jeff Adkin, a Microsoft Premier Field Engineer based in Canada, gets back to business and shows us how to use PowerShell to graphically represent information gathered over...

You're using Forefront Threat Management Gateway 2010 (a.k.a. TMG 2010) as a proxy server and want users to be prompted for credentials in order to access the Internet, but discover the default behavior is to have the browser display a "Denied Access...

Mark at AskPFEPlat digs into an Xperf startup trace and talks through identification of normal vs abnormal: In the past , I briefly talked about using the XPERF Services pane and on which to focus, but my guidance lacked clear and concise direction...

Saud from the UK Manageability Guys has been helping customers migrate from WSUS to System Center Configuration Manager 2012 . For desktop migrations, customers are usually happy to take all updates or the majority of updates and just start fresh...

Awesome tip on how you can search for something (for example, searching for System Center docs within Technet ), with more precision than the usual site:technet.microsoft.com ! This feature allows to use Bing to directly search against the meta...

Kirk “has-more-points-than-I-do” Evans shares some PowerShell to configure the SQL Server Provider for FBA , for Sharepoint 2010. A long time ago, I wrote a blog post that shows how to configure the SQL Server Provider for FBA in SharePoint 2010 . ...

While filling us in on his weekend plans, Rhoderick accidentally lets slip that System Center 2012 SP1 Beta is now available . This is an interesting release as it is adding support for Windows Server 2012.  In the case of SCVMM 2012 SP1, it means...

Not any more, they’re not! As long as you take Ashley McGlone’s advice in Freaky neat Active Directory site links with PowerShell : Today's post will help you clean up site link descriptions and give you some nice reporting capability. For a quick overview...

Article written by Santos Martinez , a US-based Microsoft Premier Field Engineer and resident ConfigNinja . Do you want to expand your stand-alone System Center Configuration Manager 2012 (a.k.a ConfigMgr) primary site into an hierarchy? So you...

David Hail over at the PFE Virtualization Blog notes a correlation between BIOS power state settings (c-states) and Hyper-V performance during live migrations: How long does it take for you to do a live migration between hosts? I ask that of...

Gregg O’Brien is a Microsoft Premier Field Engineer from Canada, where French people are readily available. The Challenge: Capturing Traffic Across VMs There comes a point in the life of every server administrator where they must take a...

Lots of security-related news to catch up on. (Ed note: I’m one of the developers/maintainers of the Security Health Check 4.5 offering, so I try to keep abreast of developments at home and elsewhere in the industry.) Alexandre Marins introduces the new...

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...

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...

Michel Audet , a Premier Field Engineer from Microsoft Canada, tackles the very important issue of ‘alert storms’ by prioritizing certain workloads over others. He shows how this is done by using the ‘Distributed Applications’ feature in Microsoft Operations...

This article was contributed by Ryan Doon , a PFE working at Microsoft Canada. Clustering in Windows 2008 R2 has been greatly simplified, and one of those areas of simplification includes choosing which quorum model to use. Based on the cluster...

This article has been written by Gregg O'Brien, who works as a Premier Field Engineer in Microsoft Canada. He presents this quick list of resources for getting acquainted with IPv6. It’s no secret to most IT professionals by now that we are...

PFE Antoni Hanus posted a getting-started-quickly guide on System Center Service Management for Incident Management . System Center 2012 - Service Manager (SCSM) includes Incident Management, Service Request fulfillment, Problem Management, Change Management...

There’s no better way to learn something than to teach someone else! (With some possible exceptions ). Bruce Adamczak has been going hammer and tongs at the Windows Server 2012 feature set, and has been publishing links and summaries at a rapid pace....

Joao Botto, a Premier Field Engineer from the United States, writes about different backup and recovery options available in Windows 8: File History, Physical2Virtual and Refresh/Reset. File History If you have just deployed Windows 8 and want...

Did you know that Windows Azure now offers a preview Infrastructure as as Service (IaaS) Virtual Machine hosting role? And that combined with Virtual Networking, you can merge the Azure VM portion of your network seamlessly with your corporate network...

Mark Morowczynski posted about a developing situation where the public usno.navy.mil time clock jumped back to 2000, and if your DCs were syncing from it, what to do about it . We are seeing some reports that some Active Directory Domain times are reverting...