Windows 7

Windows 7 comes with several features that promise to greatly improve file access over a WAN. One of them is version 2 of the SMB protocol, another transparent caching. This article describes how I measured their effectiveness.

[What I wrote here is wrong. Please read this follow-up article.] Here is a very simple way to reduce the time it takes to boot Windows 7 by around 20% (the exact number depends on the hardware).

Access Based Enumeration (ABE) is a well-hidden feature even in Windows Server, where it can be configured per share, but only in the Share and Storage Management MMC and not when right-clicking a folder in Explorer. Thanks to the shared code base ABE is available in Windows 7, too, although hidden even better. Let’s find out how to enable it anyway.

If you roll out Windows 7 in an enterprise environment you may need to decide what to do with IPv6. As you probably know, Windows 7 comes with IPv6 enabled by default. That is certainly nice, but what if your network does not “do” IPv6 yet? Should you disable IPv6 in Windows 7?

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:

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 the trouble started.