A popular misconception about mandatory user profiles is that they are deleted at logoff. I freely admit that I thought so, too, until I made some tests that proved I was wrong. Continue reading ‘Are Mandatory User Profiles Deleted at Logoff – or Cached?’
When you are publishing PowerShell code on the web, you soon discover that it looks much nicer with syntax highlighting – as did I. There are several ways to add syntax highlighting to your blog or web site, most of which rely on external (Wordpress) plugins or JavaScript on the page. I do not like that approach too much. I prefer to have the syntax highlighting embedded in the HTML code. That way I have full control over the appearance (and the highlighting also works in Google Reader). The logical solution is to use a script that embeds HTML coloring tags directly into the script. Continue reading ‘Syntax Highlighting PowerShell Code in HTML – With a PowerShell Script’
How to easily create a list of all programs and (MSI) packages installed on a system for later processing? That sounds like a simple task, and it is. Interestingly, a quick web search revealed primarily more complex solutions where a script is used to iterate through the uninstall information in the registry. That not only is far too complicated, but also inaccurate. Continue reading ‘How to List All Installed Applications From the Command Line’
App-V’s Dynamic Suite Composition is a powerful feature in that it allows multiple “bubbles” to share the same virtual environment. In other words, package A can be made dependent on package B. But if DSC is used extensively, dependencies between packages tend to become difficult to manage – there seems to be no simple way of listing all packages’ dependencies. Well, I have written a PowerShell script that does just that. Continue reading ‘PowerShell Script Lists App-V Package Dependencies (Dynamic Suite Composition, DSC)’
Normally, finding the cause for high CPU utilization is easy – just start Task Manager. But what if the component consuming CPU cycles is a driver that runs in the kernel? In that case, there is no regular process Task Manager could attribute the usage to. You will see the “System Idle Process” at around 98%, but the “Performance” tab might indicate 50% CPU usage. How can that be? Continue reading ‘How to Analyze Kernel Performance Bottlenecks (and Find that ATI’s Catalyst Drivers Cause 50% CPU Utilization)’
This article describes a bug that dramatically reduces file copy performance on Windows systems. I cannot provide a fix (not having access to the Windows source code), but I have found a workaround. Continue reading ‘The 30 Second File Copy Bug, or: EFS = Bad Performance?’
I wish all my friends and readers a merry christmas and happy new year!
I hope you like sepago’s annual Christmas comic. Continue reading ‘VXI: How a Customer With Real Scalability Problems Uses Virtualization’
