Citrix User Profile Manager: User Store Design Recommendations Citrix User Profile Manager, co-developed by sepago and Citrix, has been released. This is the first in a loose series of articles about UPM I intend to write. I will […] Read more
User Profile Design: A Primer 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 article tries list the dos and […] Read more
MEncode.cmd Now Supports Wildcards My simple yet effective batch file-based solution for converting digital videos in Quicktime MOV format from Panasonic Lumix and other cameras to MPEG-2, MEncode.cmd, now supports wildcards, too. Now you […] Read more
How to Prevent Users from Changing Permissions on File Servers On file servers in corporate environments one typically does not want users to change permissions, even on their own files. It might seem that it would be sufficient to simply […] Read more
Internet Explorer in Protected Mode – How the Low Integrity Environment Gets Created Ever wondered what lies beneath the covers of Protected Mode Internet Explorer? Short answer, long explanation: mandatory integrity control (MIC). Read more
Enter ProfileNurse – Your Skilled Profile Care Professional User profiles can be bitchy. A single misbehaving profile is bad enough, but what if you have hundreds or thousands of them? Most admins have a boatload of profiles strewn […] Read more
Deleting User Profiles – Correctly Commenter Steven asked in response to my article on how not to delete local user profiles for the correct way to script the deletion of user profiles. Here is how. Read more
How to Reduce the Size of Roaming 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. Roaming user profiles tend to grow over […] Read more
How to Convert Quicktime MOV Video Files to MPEG-2 [Update 1: Fixed bugs in the batch file and made it available for download] [Update 2: Wildcards are now supported] [Update 3: Timestamps are now copied from source to destination […] Read more
Troubleshooting User Profile Problems on Vista and Server 2008 – But How? User profile problems are among the most common support issues. It is only appropriate that Microsoft simplified the troubleshooting process over time – but forgot to port it over to […] Read more
Deleting a Local User Profile – Not as easy as one Might Assume In many environments it is a common practice to delete user profiles prior to conducting tests in order to start with a clean slate. However, this may prove more difficult […] Read more
VMware vs. Microsoft: Why Memory Overcommitment is Useful in Production and Why Microsoft Denies it In the ongoing virtualization war much has been written (pro and con) about the value of memory overcommitment, a feature VMware ESX has and Microsoft Hyper-V is lacking (XenServer, too, […] Read more
Why Disabling the Creation of 8.3 DOS File Names Will Not Improve Performance. Or Will It? It is a common practice amongst administrators to disable the creation of short filenames on NTFS. I freely admit to have recommended this in the past. Was I wrong? Background […] Read more
Choosing a Future-Proof Internal DNS Domain Name: Mission Impossible? Choosing a domain name that will only be visible from an internal network may look simple. Unfortunately, it is not. The basic problem: How to avoid collisions between the internal […] Read more
My New Book is Out: Windows Server 2008 Command Line Reference The command line is a powerful tool. Many a tedious task can be offloaded to a cleverly written script. Scripts and batch files, however, are like tool boxes without too […] Read more
How to Run Console Programs Without a Console Window From time to time the question gets asked how a batch file or console program can be executed silently or hidden, i.e. without a console window popping up. If you […] Read more
ParseCitrixLicense Now Supports XenDesktop Licenses, Too A few weeks ago I published the tool ParseCitrixLicense which displays the contents of Citrix license files in a human-readable form. The original version 1.0 did not support XenDesktop licenses, […] Read more
How to Configure Font Smoothing on Presentation Server and XenApp With the release of the hotfixes KB946633 and PSE450R02W2K3037 ClearType font smoothing is finally available on both the current and the upcoming Citrix flagship products Presentation Server 4.5 and XenApp […] Read more
Finally! Font Smoothing Over RDP/ICA on Server 2003 It took five years and probably lots of customer complaints, but finally one of the most important technologies introduced with XP/Server 2003 is available over the remoting protocols RDP and […] Read more
Corrupt User Profiles – Do They Even Exist? I will make a bold statement here: corrupt user profiles are a myth. That may seem very bold indeed, with 331,000 hits on Google for “corrupt user profile” and countless […] Read more
Free Tool to Help You Better Understand What is Inside a Citrix License File Update: Version 1.1 supports XenDesktop Licenses in Addition to XenApp Licenses Most Citrix products rely heavily on license files. While the basic format of a license file is somewhat documented, […] Read more
Undocumented Changes to the Cluster.exe Command Line Tool in Server 2008 While working on the next edition of my book I found several documentation errors on Microsoft’s Technet pages describing the command line tools of Windows Server 2008. One of the […] Read more
x64? My Terminal Servers Run Just Fine With 32 Bits and 8/12/16 GB RAM! A recent discussion with a colleague brought this topic to my attention which I have not discussed in detail in my series on Windows x64: Memory scalability of 32-bit Terminal […] Read more
The Most Interesting New Feature of Server 2008 Terminal Services / XenApp 5.0? Why, Font Smoothing! Much has been written about the many new features of Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services. Now, with the upcoming release of Citrix XenApp 5.0 (Project Delaware), Citrix updates its best-selling […] Read more
Free Tool – List Registry Links (REG_LINK) Recently I got into a very interesting discussion with my colleague Nicholas Dille on various aspects of Windows x64. One question he brought up was especially intriguing: knowing about registry […] Read more
Windows x64 Part 7: File System & Registry Redirection, Registry Reflection This is the seventh part of a mini-series on Windows x64, focusing on behind the scene changes in the operating system. In the last article I explained that mixed 32-/64-bit […] Read more
Windows x64 Part 6: COM, DLLs and Processes This is the sixth part of a mini-series on Windows x64, focusing on behind the scene changes in the operating system. In the last article I discussed how 32-bit applications […] Read more
Windows x64 Part 5: NTVDM, Services, WoW64 This is the fifth part of a mini-series on Windows x64, focusing on behind the scene changes in the operating system. In the last article I explained that the 64-bit […] Read more
Windows x64 Part 4: Code Trees, Drivers This is the fourth part of a mini-series on Windows x64, focusing on behind the scene changes in the operating system. In the last article I wrote about the changes […] Read more
Windows x64 Part 3: CPUs, AMD64, Intel 64, EM64T, Itanium This is the third part of a mini-series on Windows x64, focusing on behind the scene changes in the operating system. In the first two articles (here and here) I […] Read more
