How to Analyze Kernel Performance Bottlenecks (and Find that ATI’s Catalyst Drivers Cause 50% CPU Utilization) Normally, finding the cause for high CPU utilization is easy – just start Task Manager. But what if the component consuming CPU cycles is a driver that runs in the […] Read more
The 30 Second File Copy Bug, or: EFS = Bad Performance? This article describes a bug that dramatically reduces file copy performance on Windows systems. I cannot provide a fix (not having access to the Windows source code), but I have […] Read more
VXI: How a Customer With Real Scalability Problems Uses Virtualization I wish all my friends and readers a merry christmas and happy new year! I hope you like sepago’s annual Christmas comic. Read more
Fixing Office 2007’s Quick Access Toolbars With Citrix User Profile Manager Not sure where user profile management might be useful? Here is an example that should apply to almost everyone. Read more
Should Roaming User Profiles Be Backed Up? This article is part of Helge’s Profile Toolkit, a set of posts explaining the knowledge and tools required to tame Windows user profiles. This may seem like a silly question, […] Read more
New Articles, Tools, Tips and Tricks: Windows, Hyper-V, Citrix, PowerShell and Application Streaming / App-V Windows Beginning with Vista, when formatting a drive the entire disk is overwritten with zeroes. While this is good for end users who like to wipe all data prior to […] Read more
My Take on ChromeOS? It will be Successful when End Users can Manage their Photos and Music in the Cloud ChromeOS seems to be the talk of the day. Why not? It is an interesting concept. But will it be successful? That is the wrong question, actually. It should be […] Read more
How to Easily Monitor System Performance with the new DiskLED 1.1 DiskLED is a small tool that displays performance counter data using an animated system tray icon. The new version 1.1 comes with a graphical configuration dialog that lets you choose […] Read more
Citrix Products 2010: A Wish List What would Joe, a Citrix admin, put on his Christmas wish list? Here are some guesses in no special order. Read more
What is a CTP Meeting all about? I just returned from my first CTP (Citrix Technology Professional) meeting and thought I might share a few experiences. The meeting took place in one of Citrix’s headquarter buildings in […] Read more
Virtualization – Old Hat? Although humans in general and members of its subspecies “marketing manager” in particular tend to treat currently “hot” topics as new and revolutionary, they only rarely are. In fact, “new” […] Read more
Found my first bug in Windows 7 APIs: PdhBrowseCounters requires Elevation I just found out the following, which does not seem to be documented anywhere: The Windows API has a function for displaying a dialog that lets the user select a […] Read more
Radio Buttons in MFC (Visual Studio 2008 / C++) This is a quick and dirty description of how to use radio buttons in MFC, written because I could not find this information in a single place on the web. […] Read more
On the Usefulness of self-extracting Archives I just found out that the new firmware version 2.1 for my digital camera Panasonic Lumix LX3 has been published. Very nice, especially the speed improvements. So I downloaded the […] Read more
New XenDesktop 4 Licensing Model: Flexibility? Yes, but at what Cost? It seems the Citrix community had only had one topic recently, albeit one discussed hotly: licensing. Now that Citrix has given in and practically allowed all conceivable license types, everybody […] Read more
DiskLED – A Flexible Hard Disk and General System Activity Indicator System Tray Applet What do you do when your computer reacts sluggishly to even the simplest commands? You probably look at its hard disk LED to determine if the disk is busy, because […] Read more
Profile Hell – The Reality of Windows User Profiles This article is part of Helge’s Profile Toolkit, a set of posts explaining the knowledge and tools required to tame Windows user profiles. A user calls the help desk to […] Read more
How to Determine the Windows Installation Date with and without PowerShell There are many ways to determine when Windows was installed. Here are some of them. Read more
New Articles, Tools, Tips and Tricks: Bugs, Annoyances, PowerShell and some other Stuff Bugs and Annoyances ICA connections initiated over the ICA client object (ICO) SDK fail because 128-bit encryption cannot be enabled. Apparently, setting EncryptionLevelSession does not work. Annoyingly, this bug is […] Read more
Useful PowerShell Scriptlets for Files and Folders What is the best way to learn PowerShell? Never use cmd.exe again! With PowerShell 2.0 on my Windows 7 machine I decided it finally is time to polish my rusty […] Read more
How to Convert Videos from Panasonic’s Lumix DMC-TZ7 from MOV to MPEG-2 This is an update to my post on how to convert Quicktime videos in MOV format to MPEG-2. Recently a friend of mine asked me how my conversion script could […] Read more
Virtualization? Nothing But Lies! With virtualization, lying has become respectable. Processors lie to user mode processes about memory addresses. Computers lie to operating systems about installed hardware. Storage systems lie to everybody about the […] Read more
Citrix User Profile Manager (UPM) and the Broken Rootdrive Terminal server application compatibility scripts have been around for a long time – so long in fact, that I considered them a legacy and stowed away any knowledge of them […] Read more
Which Image File Format (GIF/PNG/JPG) to Choose – a Consultant's Answer Which answer does a good consultant give to most general questions? “It depends.” Computer networks are complex systems, and usually there is no single option that fits all scenarios equally […] Read more
Moving the Firefox Cache Directory and Profile Separately On my computers I try to keep my data on its own partition, well away from program files and other stuff that gets (re-) created anyway when I install a […] Read more
New Web Content Actually Worth Reading (August 2009) Why does Windows 7 feel faster than Vista, although really it is not? Improvements to the graphics driver model (WDDM got upgraded to version 1.1) certainly add to this feeling […] Read more
Programming Sins Regarding the Registry (Using the Example of Microsoft Excel) While browsing through the registry I found the following “gem”. It illustrates nicely how programmers are not supposed to store settings in the registry: [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\MenuExt\Nach Microsoft E&xcel exportieren] @="res://C:\\PROGRA~2\\MICROS~1\\Office12\\EXCEL.EXE/3000" […] Read more
Registry Fun (Working With Hive Files) Sometimes it is necessary to export/import data from or into the registry for some sort of additional processing. To this end, often regedit is used to create .REG files, which […] Read more
I Was Interviewed – Twice In the past few days I have been interviewed twice: in the German O’Reilly blog and in sepago’s marketing/HR blog. You can find the two (different) interviews here: Das Making-of […] Read more
Puzzle: Delete Directory Content Without Deleting the Directory Itself (on the Command Line) The Windows command line is a powerful beast. It can be made to do things one would never have thought possible, but it can be very tricky indeed to find […] Read more
