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 selling or throwing away a disk drive, SAN-based volumes should not be formatted like this. Perform a quick format instead. But if you want to make sure the data is really gone - no need for “secure erase” programs any more! The need for multiple overwrites is a myth.

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 rephrased to: When will it be successful?

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 from all performance counters available on the local system - you can monitor network throughput just as easily as hard disk activity or memory usage. In this article, I am going to show you how to do that.

What would Joe, a Citrix admin, put on his Christmas wish list? Here are some guesses in no special order. XenApp A version of XenApp that runs on Windows Server 2008 R2 One console only, at least for XenApp PowerShell SDK for managing XenApp Realtime audio/video so that, for example, Microsoft Office Communication Server can be used well Migration tool that exports an old farm’s settings and imports them after optional transformation into a new farm Support for XenApp in SCCM (Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager)

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 Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The meeting itself ran over two days, which means that most attendees were away from home and work for four. While that is certainly nice to know, the question you probably have is: “What does actually happen during such a meeting?”

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” should be considered as in “new wine in old bottles” rather than in “did not exist before”. Take virtualization. Although the topic of the day seems to be cloud computing, virtualization can probably still be called “hot” (especially since a cloud also is a kind of virtualization). But is it new? Judge for yourself: Below I have compiled a list of boring old technologies that employ virtualization.

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 specific performance counter from all counters available on the local or a remote computer. The dialog is used by perfmon.exe, for example, and looks like this:

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.

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 firmware, a self-extracting archive, started the executable and had it uncompress the actual firmware file (a .bin file). Interestingly, the “compressed” .exe file is larger than the uncompressed .bin file:

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 is happy?! It seems so, although CCU licenses have doubled in price, as Shawn Bass points out. But is this really the happy ending of a short but wild story? Maybe, maybe not. Let me explain.

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 if it is, the only thing that really helps is waiting (apart from buying a faster disk or SSD). Problem solved - if you are sitting right next to the machine. But what if you are using a protocol like RDP or ICA to connect to a remote computer or VM? No HDD LED, no quick and simple way to check for hard drive activity. This has been bugging me enough to write a software replacement: DiskLED.

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 report a strange malfunction of an application. What does the help desk technician do? Analyze the root cause of the problem? Probably not. Most likely, the user’s profile will be deleted and the problem will have gone away. Happy ending? Not at all!

There are many ways to determine when Windows was installed. Here are some of them. Systeminfo The systeminfo tool displays a lot of interesting information about the computer and the operating system, among them the installation date. Here is some sample output:

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 more than a year old, was fixed in the ICA client 10.2 and reappeared in the current version 11.0. Bugs like this one are bad for the entire Citrix ecosystem, because they break cool tools like Citrix Quick Launch, xConnect and others I may not even know about. [Update 2009-09-30: this bug has been fixed in ICA client 11.2.]

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 knowledge of the language dating back to the days when PowerShell was still called Monad. In my attempt to re-familiarize myself with PoSh I consciously use it for tasks that would take me mere seconds with other tools like cmd.exe, or even old friends like Perl. But, hey, learning takes time, and there is nothing better than practice! Here are a couple of things I have learned en route.

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 be used for a slightly different camera model. While I use it for the videos from my Lumix LX3, he owns a TZ7, which uses slightly different parameters that make it necessary to tweak the script. Luckily those changes are small.

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 location of data. The virtualization hype transforms honest down-to-earth systems into lying medusas.

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 in a very remote area of my brain. When a Citrix customer brought up a problem with the mapping of ROOTDRIVE in the User Profile Manager forum, at first I had no clue what he was talking about. Luckily, the customer was able to pin the problem down to a specific command that failed when, and only when, User Profile Manager was processing the logon. This is the story of UsrLogon.cmd, ACRegL.exe and UPM.

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 well.

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 new OS. Separation of data from all the other stuff is an old principle and makes it possible to just delete the OS partition whenever you feel like it without giving the safety of your precious data too much thought.

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 and reduce the memory footprint of the desktop windows manager (DWM) process. Microsoft describes the changes in its Graphics Guide for Windows 7.

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" "Contexts"=dword:00000001 What is wrong with this? Several things:

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 store a human-readable text interpretation of the registry content. .REG files can be edited easily with any capable text editor (even Notepad), and thus are a common way of making a collection of settings available to others. By the way, importing a .REG file’s data silently is done with the following command:

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 der “Windowsbefehle kurz & gut” und der Admin-Alltag Einfach Helge Klein As you may have guessed from the titles, it helps to be able to read German.