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
How to Easily Fix Wrong Timestamps on Files from your Digital Camera Ever had the situation where by some mishap the file times on your digital images got changed and there seemingly was no way of knowing when a picture was taken […] Read more
Canon EOS 350D and Windows 7 x64 – Where are the Drivers, Canon? After neglecting my good old Canon EOS 350D for some time, I took some pictures with it yesterday, which I wanted to transfer to my laptop, of course. And there […] Read more
Replicating User Profiles Between Sites (With or Without DFS) – Why it Should be Avoided This article is part of Helge’s Profile Toolkit, a set of posts explaining the knowledge and tools required to tame Windows user profiles. Roaming user profiles seems like such a […] Read more
x64 Divided by Two is NOT x32! At the verge of the transition from 32-bit to 64-bit Windows it is interesting to observe how people interpret and misuse acronyms for the definition of “their” platform. Looking at […] Read more
How Much Memory Does a Database/File/Print/Terminal/Web Server Need? Here are some very simple guidelines that help determine how much memory a particular server actually needs in order to perform well. Of course, these are just rules of thumb, […] Read more
How Forcing Password Changes Actually Weakens Security When was the last time you got that not too friendly message stating that your password has expired and asking you to change it? Probably only a few weeks ago, […] Read more
Four Ways to Increase the Capacity of Your Citrix XenApp Farm Even with the most meticulous design, the day will come when your farm’s capacity is not sufficient any more. User numbers increase, applications become more resource-hungry and the amount of […] Read more
New Web Content Actually Worth Reading (June 2009) Jim Moyle recently started a blog on desktop and application delivery. While reading his first two posts I thought “yes, that’s so right“. Regretfully, people like him, who disregard the […] Read more
Hear Me Speak and Talk to Me Do you like what you read in this blog but have questions I did not answer (yet)? Or do you prefer listening and talking to live human beings instead of […] Read more
Where is the Hosts File on Windows x64? [A German translation of this article is available at faq-o-matic.net.] The subtle differences between 32-bit and 64-bit Windows present so many intricacies and pitfalls that even Microsoft employees seem to […] Read more
New KB Articles on User Profiles (April to May 2009) This is a collection of new knowledge base articles related to Windows user profiles. As you can see, the last two months were pretty quiet. So quiet, that you may […] Read more
Folder De-Localization with Citrix User Profile Manager (UPM) Windows user profiles prior to Vista / Server 2008 contain localized folder names. End users expect that, of course, but admins tend to hate it because automated management becomes much […] Read more
File Copy Performance to USB Drive Oscillating Between Fast and Slow I just had the “pleasure” of having to copy the contents of a terabyte USB disk to another similar USB drive. At first, I did not give this simple task […] Read more
Hard Links and Permissions / ACLs Commenter Lee asked how ACLs are evaluated when an object has multiple hard links. I replied with comments of my own, which turned out to be wrong after I did […] Read more
Cleaning up the Mess Left Behind by Multiple EFS Certificates In case you have (un?)wittingly been juggling around with multiple EFS certificates like me, you may feel a strong urge to clean up the mess. Which mess? It can happen […] Read more
Tales from the Crypt – EFS and the Upgrade to Windows 7 RC How can you mess up a simple OS upgrade by using encryption? Simple. Here is what happened to me when I upgraded my Windows 7 beta system to the RC […] Read more
How to Find and List Unsigned Executable Files Executable files can (and should be!) digitally signed. Without a digital signature you can never be sure the files on your hard disk have not been tampered with. There is […] Read more
Is VMware Clustering / VMotion Complex Compared to Microsoft Failover Clustering? My last post on VMware VMotion urged several readers to protest, maybe because of its provocative title. What I did was to compare VMware clustering with Microsoft failover clustering. I […] Read more
You’ll Know Me by My Shirt at Citrix iForum / Synergy / Summit 2009 I will be attending the combined Citrix events iForum, Synergy and Summit 2009 in Las Vegas, which start in just a few days. As always, I hope to meet great […] Read more
VMotion Is Hyped by Consultants, But Do Admins Even Use It? Some time ago I attended a presentation by a former VMware, now Microsoft employee who claimed that Hyper-V’s lack of Live Migration aka VMotion is not relevant at all. According […] Read more
Hard Links, Soft (Symbolic) Links and Junctions in NTFS: What Are They (For)? This is an attempt at demystification. In the Windows world, links in the file system are often regarded as obscure, except for the infamous .LNK files, of course. But file […] Read more
User Profile and Home Directory Storage: Distributing the Load Across Multiple File Servers This article is part of Helge’s Profile Toolkit, a set of posts explaining the knowledge and tools required to tame Windows user profiles. The easiest way to assign user profile […] Read more
Printer Driver Isolation in Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 If you are not tired of print spooler crashes then this article is not for you. If you are, you may find a new feature of the upcoming next version […] Read more
Microsoft Tackles the "Last Writer Wins" Problem of Roaming Profiles in Windows 7 & Server 2008 R2 Among the more annoying deficiencies of roaming user profiles in terminal server farms is what came to be known as “last writer wins”. It looks like Microsoft is trying to […] Read more
New Articles on User Profiles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base (March 2009) This is a collection of new MS KB articles related to Windows user profiles. Read more
Eating Microsoft's Dog Food – A Self-Experiment With Windows 7, Part 3: Usage In the previous article of this mini-series I described how to install Windows 7 x64 beta 1 into a virtual hard disk (VHD) file. In this post I will share […] Read more
Eating Microsoft's Dog Food – A Self-Experiment With Windows 7, Part 2: Installation In the first article of this mini-series I described how I prepared my work laptop for the installation of Windows 7 x64 beta 1 into a virtual hard disk (VHD) […] Read more
Eating Microsoft's Dog Food – A Self-Experiment With Windows 7, Part 1: Preparation After reading a lot about the speed and stability of Windows 7 (beta 1), I decided it was time for me not only to use it for real work, but […] Read more
