Thoughts from the EPS Windows Server Performance Team
Another year is coming to an end. 2008 was certainly an eventful year for us here at Microsoft. Windows Server 2008, Windows Small Business Server 2008 and Windows Essential Business Server 2008 were released this year, along with a number of other products in the Enterprise space including Hyper-V, Visual Studio 2008, and SQL Server… Read more
Support for Internet Explorer transitioned from the Performance team to our Developer Support group earlier this year. Recently, this new team launched their own blog focused on Internet Explorer support issues. The AskIE blog will be discussing topics from the perspective of Core IE – from IEAK and Group Policy to programming techniques and solutions… Read more
Here’s an odd issue that one of our Support Engineers ran into with a customer recently that I thought would be interesting to share. Systems Administrators use scheduled tasks to run batch files as a normal part of their job. In this specific instance, our customer was using the PsService and PsTools utilities to perform… Read more
There are times when tools such as DebugDiag, ADPlus or UserDump fail to capture a dump when a process terminates unexpectedly. When that happens, we can launch the process inside the debugger to ensure that we capture a dump. Here’s how we do it: Install the Debugging Tools for Windows Copy and paste the information… Read more
Over the last couple of weeks, there has been an uptick in the number of different malware programs aimed at exploiting the vulnerability patched in MS08-067. If you’ve been monitoring the various security websites and blogs, then you’ve probably already seen information on malware such as Worm:Win32/Conficker.A and Backdoor:Win32/IRCbot.BH. The major AV software packages are… Read more
Hi AskPerf readers, Don Geddes here again. Today we’re going to look at Windows Error Reporting logging in Windows Server 2008 and how it can affect the Printing subsystem. There was a KB article written a while back that discussed the Windows Error Reporting service logging and how it was changed with Windows Server 2003… Read more
Hello AskPerf readers! Today’s post is being published a little later than usual. Today we are launching the Customer Preview Program (CPP) for Windows Vista Service Pack 2 to MSDN and TechNet subscribers, and we wanted to give a first look. Windows Vista SP2 is a service pack in the traditional sense with all of… Read more
I have to admit that we don’t get too many calls on Desktop Search. However, the calls we usually get revolve around rebuilding the index and adding locations. Recently however, we had a customer ask us how to modify the file types properties for Indexing. Specifically, they wanted to add a new file type to… Read more
Back when I was a Systems Administrator, one of my roles was to review the system configuration for a server prior to its implementation in the production environment. We had a fairly streamlined process for server deployment – including scripts to verify the security hardening, installed software, disabled services etc. Disabling “unnecessary” services on a… Read more
That’s right – more WMI adventures. Today we’re going to take a look at a problem that we recently encountered with a customer whose WMI script did not return any Event Log information – but the Event Logs themselves were functioning with no apparent issues. In this particular instance, the customer was using a script… Read more