IT Expert Voice

Much of performance improvement, security, and troubleshooting work is reactive. While there’s no avoiding this fact, implementing a Daily Log Review policy puts IT staff in a more pro-active position, using each day to build a set of rules that alert you to potential problems before they become serious.

How often does your team find, while troubleshooting an issue, that were small warning signs leading up to the incident but no one had noticed, or there had been no context to make it clear that they were seeing a real problem? Hopefully you don’t encounter such situations very often, but it happens. A daily log review policy can help to catch some of these issues earlier before they bog down or, worse, break your servers.

One advantage to allocating time for daily log review into your staff’s routines is that they become more familiar with the day to day workings of your systems. This knowledge in turn makes unusual occurrences stand out even more than they would have before. READ MORE

If you are trying to track down a particular program that owns a file or to try to kill a process for a particular application, then you might want to look at Sysinternals Process Explorer. This short screencast shows you what it can do.

Process Explorer v12.03 is a neat — and free! — little utility that extends what you can do beyond the task monitor that is found in Windows.

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If your Windows 7 systems need half an eternity to boot up, there’s clearly something odd going on. Dealing with slow boot problems is annoying and – let’s face it – is mostly guesswork. Guesswork that costs money and time. We have got you covered: Learn how to analyze the startup process, find the cause in no time, and get rid of bottlenecks once and for all!

Windows 7 is a fast beast, especially when it comes to its startup process which was optimized dramatically compared to Windows Vista. No wonder, as Microsoft has a dedicated team focusing strictly on startup performance. And it shows: On one- to two-year-old hardware, Windows 7 usually takes only 20 to 40 seconds to boot up. Even the performance-wise challenged netbooks rarely need more than a minute to be ready for work!

Certainly, boot times vary significantly from one computer to another. This is nothing new. But if Windows 7 clients need way longer – and we’re talking way over one or two minutes – then you’re looking at a resource hog. So what could be causing the problem?

• You just installed a new driver, which hasn’t been WHQL-certified and delays the boot up process. It could be a simple driver bug!
• You installed a piece of resource-intense software that initializes a process or a service during startup.
• You updated existing software or Windows 7 itself. Yes, it’s not unheard of that some updates cause a significant boot delay.

READ MORE

For some reason, we still don’t know why, some Windows 7 installations are deleting Windows 7 Restore Points. Here’s what we know and what you can do about it.

One of the few original contributions to operating systems that Microsoft can claim is its Restore Points feature. First included with Windows XP and the now-forgotten Windows ME, Windows automatically creates copies of system and application files, at stated intervals or before changes are made. If a new program installation or other “learning experience” wrecked the user’s system, these backed-up file collection and system settings, called Restore Points, could be used to restore a PC to a working state. What makes Restore Points different from a mere automatic back-up system is that it doesn’t touch documents and other user work files. To say, “This was much appreciated” is an understatement, especially when it’s your work that was saved.

Restore Points — and System Restore, the program behind them — worked well… until it didn’t. It turns out that many users are having serious trouble with Restore Points in Windows 7 . Whether the Restore Points are made manually, automatically by the system timer, or invoked by installing new software, they may vanish after any system reboot like morning dew on a sunny day. READ MORE

Though Windows 7 is still pretty much a newcomer to the desktop operating system scene, it’s been around long enough that IT pros will encounter the occasional circumstance that demands — or at least calls out loudly for — a complete reinstall of this much-touted OS. In the sections that follow, I lead you through some cases where a reinstall is highly recommended (if not absolutely required) to make a PC work properly.

Windows 7 has been around in full commercial use for several months, depending on how you count: since August 2009 (MSDN release) or October 2009 (commercial release). Though it may seem that reinstalling Windows is unnecessary, in some cases such a maneuver makes good sense. These include a switch from 32- to 64-bit environments, changing your BIOS hard disk access mode, and for classic Windows degunking maneuvers. READ MORE

Are some of your directories showing up as read-only? Join the crowd. It’s a common problem in Windows 7, but there are a few ways to address it.

Recently, a friend reported that since the April 13th Windows security patch, her copy of 64-bit Windows 7 is marking all folders as “read only” and she couldn’t find an easy way to fix it. She’s not alone. But this isn’t a problem that’s unique to either 64-bit Windows 7 or this particular set of patches. Instead, it seems to be an endemic problem with Windows 7 and Windows Vista.

It seems that several things can cause this problem. Among the causes: patching the system, upgrading from one version of Windows to another, and saving files to the top-level directory (C:\). Microsoft knows this is an issue, but for some reason the company doesn’t call it a bug. READ MORE

We like to imagine that every OS installation will work just as well as the vendor promises. When things don’t work out, identifying and remedying the case of failure can be time consuming and frustrating. This lesson in “how to determine why Windows 7 didn’t install” may help you troubleshoot a problem of your own – and save you from a Lost Weekend.

Over the past 13 months—that is, starting in March, 2009, when I began work on a book entitled Windows 7 in Depth—I’ve worked more or less constantly with Windows 7 across all of its versions. Because my responsibilities on the book included the OS install and configuration chapters, I probably installed Windows 7 over 200 times just for that project alone (it ended in July, and the book appeared in August). Since then, I’ve installed the OS at least another 200 times for other projects and tests, including various netbooks (Asus, Dell, MSI, and so forth), notebooks (Dell, HP, Asus, Acer, MSI, etc.), desktops (Dell, HP, Asus, and Velocity Micro, plus numerous DIY systems put together from components). Until a couple of weeks ago, I never encountered a single problem that stopped me from installing Windows 7 itself.

But when I decided it was time to switch my primary test system over from Windows 7 Ultimate x86 (32-bit) to Windows 7 Professional x64, I ran straight into a brick wall. See Table 1 near the end of this story for a detailed description of its initial and final components, plus other components I tried, as I worked my way through problem diagnosis and repair. In this article, I describe the sequence of events that occurred, explain how I finally diagnosed and fixed my problem, describe the vendor’s response to my problem report, and then meditate on what I learned through sheer dint of effort while working through this incident. My hope is that others can benefit from my experience without necessarily making the same missteps that I made along the path from problem discovery to diagnosis to ultimate solution. READ MORE

Minimalists beware: Having a solid-color background on your Windows 7 client PCs causes an extremely slow logon of up to 30 seconds. Read all about the problem and get three helpful solutions.
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