DiskLED is Now Open Source DiskLED is a tool I wrote a while ago that displays performance counter data using an animated system tray icon. It comes with a graphical configuration dialog that lets you […] Read more
Inexpensive GPU Virtualization Options for Testing For a new chapter in my ongoing series of talks and articles about browser performance I wanted to examine how key user experience metrics like page load time are dependent […] Read more
Is Blockchain the Right Technology for My Application? This is an attempt at guidelines to help in technology decisions about when and where to use blockchain technology. Read more
Building a Fast and Silent Workstation PC This article describes how to build a fast workstation PC that is almost completely silent (actually the fastest possible in terms of single-thread performance). It is based on a PC […] Read more
Hyper-V Backup – Products & Options It’s 2018, and backing up Hyper-V hosts is solved, right? I certainly expected it to be when I took on the task of finding a simple and reliable way to […] Read more
Browser Ad Blockers and Privacy You have probably been in this situation: on some shopping site you put an article in your cart, but decide not to buy it after all. Later on, you notice […] Read more
Browser Video: Codecs, Formats & Hardware Acceleration Web video is ubiquitous. We take it for granted that browsers play video in high resolution, over any connection, on any device. Behind the scenes, a complex machinery of video […] Read more
Troubleshooting Splunk Error “Search Process Did Not Exit Cleanly” When Splunk displays an orange warning triangle instead of a chart or table it is time to investigate. Start by clicking the triangle to bring up a dialog with the […] Read more
Recurring Checklists from Templates the Podio Way Podio is a superb tool for team collaboration, structured information handling and even business process management. However, it is not perfect. There are some astonishing gaps in functionality. One of […] Read more
Leaked Token Handles Preventing RDS Session ID Reuse A recent article on Microsoft’s Ask the Directory Services Team blog piqued my interest. It talks about how leaked access tokens prevent logon sessions to be freed when the user […] Read more
Streamed Video Audio Sync Problems on Windows 10 / Realtek Sound I have been watching streaming video for a very long time. It always worked beautifully, in high resolutions and from any site: YouTube, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, you name it. […] Read more
Upgrading Ubuntu 14.04 to 16.04 & PHP 5.6 to 7 for WordPress This post describes how I upgraded our webserver running WordPress on Apache from Ubuntu 14.04.5 LTS to 16.04.1 LTS. Please see this article for more information on the server’s installation […] Read more
Windows 10: Black Lock Screen with Citrix Receiver Update: KB4022723 seems to fix the black lock screen issue described in this article. The Spotlight feature of Windows 10 shows beautiful images on the lock screen. Annoyingly, it appears […] Read more
Universal Windows App Data Storage for Admins Universal Windows Platform (UWP) is the current name for a new type of application platform originally introduced with Windows 8 as “Metro” and later renamed to “Modern”. UWP apps can […] Read more
Disabling Azure Active Directory Password Expiration User accounts created in Azure AD are subject to Azure AD’s password policies and restrictions, whose defaults are far from optimal. Unfortunately, the most severe shortcomings cannot currently be changed. Read more
Delprof2 & SetACL Studio Free for Commercial Use I am happy to announce that my tools Delprof2 and SetACL Studio are now free to use, both for individuals and corporations. Previously, Delprof2 was only free to use commercially […] Read more
The Perfect Workstation: Fujitsu Celsius J550 When it comes to selecting a general-purpose workstation I tend to be looking for the impossible: high performance, superb reliability, quiet operation, moderate price. Amazingly, there exists at least one […] Read more
Faster Trimming & Compacting of Hyper-V Ubuntu VMs A while ago I described how to compact an Ubuntu VHDX running on Hyper-V using the sfill command. Running sfill, however, can take hours. Luckily, there is a much faster […] Read more
Keyboard Shortcuts You’ll Never Want to Miss Again Keyboard shortcuts are the key to productivity and efficiency. This is true for any machine, any OS and any application. This article lists shortcuts I personally find very helpful and […] Read more
Comparison: CPU & GPU Usage of 4 Browsers How do popular browsers differ in compute footprint when running animations? In this article I am comparing the CPU as well as the GPU utilization of Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, […] Read more
What’s Wrong with Group Policy Over the years I have worked with Group Policy in many different ways. My experience ranges from helping an enterprise client establish a brand new set of policies for physical […] Read more
Lenovo Yoga 900: SSD Upgrade & Clean Windows Installation The Lenovo Yoga 900 packs some amazing hardware in an ultraportable 1.29 kg 13″ chassis: high-resolution 3200×1800 screen, Intel Core i7-6500U CPU, 16 GB RAM. The only downsides I found […] Read more
Windows 10 Roaming Profile: Sharing Violation Every 2nd Logon I came across this problem while preparing my sessions for this year’s conferences. The setup is boringly simple: a user with a roaming profile logging on to a Windows 10 […] Read more
Hyper-V on Hetzner’s EX51 Hosted Dedicated Servers Your low-cost high-performance cloud data center building block. This guide explains how to install Windows Server 2012 R2 on Hetzner’s EX51-SSD dedicated servers. That line of servers is very attractive […] Read more
How Group Policy Impacts Logon Performance #4: Citrix Policies This article is based on my Citrix Synergy 2015 session and is the fourth in a mini-series on Group Policy performance. All measurements by uberAgent on Windows Server 2012 R2 […] Read more
VMware Horizon in a Lab: Getting Rid of SSL Errors This is a description of a quick and dirty way to get SSL to work correctly in a VMware Horizon View installation in a lab environment. Do not do this […] Read more
Microsoft Windows Enterprise State Roaming – First Thoughts Microsoft just announced a new service called Enterprise State Roaming. The broader goal seems to be to replace roaming user profiles. That, however, is not going to happen any time […] Read more
How Group Policy Impacts Logon Performance #3: WMI Filters & ILT This article is based on my Citrix Synergy 2015 session and is the third in a mini-series on Group Policy performance. All measurements by uberAgent on Windows Server 2012 R2 […] Read more
Compacting Hyper-V VHDX Files of Ubuntu Linux VMs Note: if your guest OS supports the trim command you can use the faster method described in this article. If you configured your Hyper-V virtual machines with dynamically expanding virtual […] Read more
