Welcome to day 4 of our Launch Series. Today we are going to talk about the speed at which Windows boots up. Windows 8’s fast startup mode is the default option on a Windows 8 client computer. Windows 8 systems that are built using Unified Extensible...

Welcome to day 3 of our Launch Series.  This is part two of the new Start Screen and User Interface in Windows 8.  In part one, we covered tiles and groups.  Today, we will look into switching between applications, the Snap feature, and...

Welcome to day 2 of our Launch Series. This is part one of a two part series regarding the new Start Screen and User Interface in Windows 8. Today, we will look into tiles and groups. The Start screen replaces the Start menu from previous versions...

Welcome to day 1 of our Windows 8 / Windows Server 2012 Launch Series! We hope you will enjoy reading this series as much as we enjoyed putting the content together. With that said, our first post is going to talk about the upgrade paths and editions...

There's a little over a month to go until Windows 8 hits store shelves. We're going to be taking a short hiatus here on AskPerf while we get our Launch Series content ready. On October 22nd we will roll out the first post of the series – and then...

Hi AskPerf readers, this is Paul from the Microsoft Remote Resources Support Team. We have been receiving a number of support questions concerning the use of Client Access Points (CAPs) and the use of CNAME alias records when referencing a Failover Clustered...

Good morning AskPerf!  Akash Nema here from the Performance team.  Today we are going to chat about how to tweak the printer list presented when using the Add Printer Wizard in Windows 7. We frequently see situations with Domain joined users...

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...

Good morning AskPerf!  Madhurjya here from the Windows Performance Team to alert you on an emerging issue where random MMC snap-ins will fail after installing the June 2012 .NET updates. After installing these .NET updates on a Windows 7 or Windows...

Hello AskPerf! Today is an exciting day as we have released both Windows 8 and Server 2012 to manufacturing! Please read Steven Sinofsky's and Jeffrey Snover’s blog posts below: Releasing Windows 8 – August 1, 2012 Windows Server 2012...

Hello AskPerf Blog Readers!  Steven Sinofsky published the below blog last week just in case you missed it.  It was authored by one of our lead Program Managers on the Printing team.  It talks about some of the new exciting Printing features...

Hello AskPerf!  Not sure if you’ve heard about this new feature with Windows 8 Server beta or not, but you can now manage your machines via Windows PowerShell in a web browser.  This means, you can use Windows PowerShell from a large variety...

Hello AskPerf! I’m Craig Marcho, a Senior Support Escalation Engineer in the Microsoft Platforms Core Team. There has been an increase in cases lately with Windows 7 Clients and Windows Server 2008 R2 Print Servers where Clients will show print queues...

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 everyone! This is Harshad Joshi from the Performance Team at Microsoft. In today’s post, I am going discuss an interesting feature of Remote Desktop Services configured for users via Group Policy Preferences. Recently, I had a request from...

Good morning AskPerf! One of our large call generators that we still see is with PTE depletions on Windows Server 2003 Terminal Servers (x86). Scaling your W2K3 Terminal Server can be challenging as the load increases with additional users and the limits...

Good day AskPerf! Last Thursday we announced the availability of the Windows 8 Release Preview (a little late on the blog posting I know). If you’ve been living under a rock, then this is new news to you. If not, then I’m sure you may have...

Good morning Folks! Today is a quick post to inform you of a new Blog from the Windows Server team that talks about the new RDS (Remote Desktop Services) features in Windows Server 2012. Check it out! Windows Server 2012 Remote Desktop Services (RDS...

In previous versions of Windows, clients with remote connections would often initiate network traffic to retrieve remote information from a print server, resulting in a resource-consuming call to the server.  This behavior was more significant when...

Good morning AskPerf! Kapil Patry here from the Microsoft Platforms Support Team. I am blogging today about an issue I recently worked. This particular issue dealt with the creation of a task using Task Scheduler on a Windows 2008 R2 Server (can occur...

Good morning AskPerf! Digvijay here to chat about print server migration. All server admins have probably had an opportunity to migrate print servers. This process can be fast and easy when migrating between the same versions of operating systems; and...

Hello AskPerf and Happy Friday!  This is just a quick post to let you know that Flavio, one of our Disk Experts on the Core team, has posted another informative blog post; this time on Performance Monitor Disk Counters.  Check it out and have...

A new printing hotfix rollup was released that updates the core print spooler components localspl.dll, splwow64.exe, spoolsv.exe, win32spl.dll, and Winprint.dll.  This rollup is designed to reduce known issues such as printing performance, print...

Good morning AskPerf! Sanket Jagtap here from Platforms Team here to discuss an interesting issue I recently worked.  My customer had a Windows 2008 R2 Server, and could not connect locally to WMI.  When they ran “wmimgmt.msc” and tried to connect...

Good morning AskPerf! There are several issues that have been associated with a high number of inactive Terminal Server ports. Delayed logon times to RDP sessions, failure of printers to redirect, and slow server performance due to registry bloat from...