This tip is for Windows Vista, 2008 RTM, 2008 R2 and 7.

Your Internet Explorer download window may be lying to you. If so,
how can you tell? Your Youtube video is taking forever to play, or is stopping.
How fast is your connection? Sure, you can try one of the download speed tests,
but do you really care how fast your connection is to some arbitrary site?
Probably not; more likely you care about sites and files that you are actually
downloading. This tip will show you how you can tell exactly how fast you are
downloading files off of the network. I use this all of the time as I travel
and use a 3G/4G air card and like to check on how fast my file downloads really
are since they can take a while and I am impatient.

A tool was introduced in Windows Vista, which at the time was
called Reliability and Performance
Monitor and now is called Resource Monitor. Using this tool, I will show you how to do a quick check of your
network download speeds.

There
are many ways to open Resource Monitor, in Windows 7 and 2008 R2 you can go to
Start and type resmon. You can also
open the Task Manager first and go to the Performance tab and click the
Resource Monitor button. You will want to do this while you are downloading so
you can see the real-time information that Resource Monitor displays.

To verify your download speed, click the
Overview tab and look under the Network panel. This will show a list on all of
the processes on your machine that are using the network. You can sort the
columns, so click on the Receive (B/sec)
column and sort by the highest bytes per second. In the image below you can see
my Internet Explorer downloads window is reporting that I am downloading the
file at 233KB/sec, wow! That would be great for my 3G connection.
Unfortunately, the reality is a little different. Resource Monitor is reporting
that iexplore.exe is Receive (B/sec) is 75,039. For anyone that does not know
how to convert bytes to kilobytes, 233KB does not equal 75,039B. ;) So Internet
Explorer is reporting that my download speed is 233 x 1024, or 238,592 bytes
per second and Resource Monitor is reporting 75,039 bytes per second. Hmm,
something is not right here. Internet Explorer does recalculate while it is
downloading and the download speed did get closer to the correct number, but
was not perfect and it took some minutes before it was close. Another good use
is when you do not have a nice download window with the download speed
displayed, as in the case of playing an online video, this works well for
playing Netflix videos on your computer also. You can use Resource Monitor the
same way to track how fast your video is downloading.

This tip is for SharePoint Server 2010.

I had this post sitting for a bit in my drafts and decided I should put it out there.

User profiles have been getting a lot of attention with SharePoint 2010. In this post I am going to show you how you can create your very own Active Directory attribute, map that attribute to the FIM client SharePoint 2010 uses to import profile information and get that attribute into SharePoint.

In some cases you will already have an Active Directory attribute and just want to map in to SharePoint. In that case you can start with step 6.

1. Create a new attribute. Enter the Common Name, LDAP name, X500 OID (Get a new OID; http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms677620(VS.85).aspx), Description and syntax.
2. Register AD Schema MMC snap in;
3. Edit the user class and add the new attribute.
4. Right-click the DC and "Reload the Schema"
5. In FIM client go to Management Agents and Refresh Schema.
6. Double click Properties
7. Select "Select Attributes" and click the "Show All" checkbox.
8. Select the new AD attribute.
9. In the MMS service application click Manage User Properties.
10. Click New Property
11. Enter a name, Display Name and other values. Select the connection, attribute and direction (Import) from the Add New Mapping group and click Add.
12. In the MMS service Application Start Profile Synchronization.
13. After profile synchronization is complete, click Manage User Profiles.
14. Search for a profile that has the attribute set.

Drop down the menu for the profile and Edit My Profile.

Happy 802.11 day! This tip is for Windows Vista, 2008 RTM, 2008 R2 and 7.

If you work on a laptop, you will have undoubtedly run into the following scenario. You try to connect to the work WiFi network, only to find that you cannot get connected, but other people are connected only feet away. So then you pick up your laptop and walk around the area looking for a connection and at some point, voila! You magically connect to the network. What is going on?

To connect to a WiFi network in Windows 7 you look for the ‘bars’ down in the right-hand side of the taskbar, in the system tray.

Clicking on the bars will open the VAN, or View Available Networks window. This is where you will see the different wireless networks and other networks available to connect to. Names of networks and address are changed to protect the innocent. ;)

As with most big WiFi networks, one access point, or router is not enough to cover all of the area; so many access points are used and your computer connects to the one it thinks has the best signal. In the screenshot above though, it looks like one network, ‘Big Hotel Chain’. Really, behind the scenes, there are many radio signals that my computer could connect to. You can view these other access points from the Command Prompt and using the following command.

Netsh WLAN show all

This is a Network shell command to view all wireless LAN information on your computer. For more information on Net Shell see the following Technet article; http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc725935(WS.10).aspx.

The output of the command will be long, longer than the command window size and even may be longer than the command prompt buffer size, so you scroll up and do not see all of the output, use the steps here to configure your command prompt screen buffer size to a larger number; http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb491037.aspx. I use 9999 as my buffer size personally.

The output of the command will start off showing you the vendor name, driver, driver version and date of your WiFi adapter along with the supported security modes like WEP40/104, WPA and WPA2. Oops, looks like I may want to update my driver. ;)

After the vendor and driver information is the connection information, which shows the service set identification (SSID) of the network you are connected with the current signal strength and the basic service set identification (BSSID). For way too much information on what these are see the IEEE standards; http://standards.ieee.org/about/get/802/802.11.html. Just remember for now that the BSSID is important if you want to know which access point you are connected to.

Next, you will see possibly some wireless profile information that is not important to this tip, but can provide more insight into what networks you have connected to and saved in the past and networks that any domain administrators have added to your machine via Group Policy (GPO). At the end of the output you will see the available networks.

You can see that there are 2 wireless networks in the range of my laptop; Big Hotel Chain and a blank network. The blank network, SSID 2 is a network that is not broadcasting its SSID over the air and shows up as ‘Other Network’ in the VAN. The first network is the hotel wireless that I am connected to. If you look at the two screenshots above you should be able to match the BSSID of my connection in blue to the available network in blue in the other screenshot. This is the actual access point I am connect to. With this information I can ask others around me to let me know what access point they are connected to and figure out if my laptop is trying to connect to another access point. If my computer always tries to connect to the same access point and has issues, then there could be a problem with that particular access point and I can open a help desk ticket with the networking folks to take care of it and I can even let them know exactly which access point is having a problem. This is sure to have them scratching their heads on how you figured this out.