The art of using performance monitor is a fairly easy one to acquire but can be one of the most useful skills for troubleshooting all sorts of problems. It’s been included with the Windows operating systems for many years (both server and client versions.) In this article I describe how to use Performance Monitor to create a baseline. This is the place to start so you have something compare any future monitoring sessions with.

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I’ve always found it difficult to get Evaluation versions of Citrix Presentation server. You have to go through a reseller and they aren’t getting anything out of it so aren’t overly keen to help. They have to speak to Citrix and basically put a business case forward of how Citrix are going to make money out of this evaluation version. Finally they have made two free licenses available for development purposes. Simply logon to the new MyCitrix and go to downloads. Great if you’re studying for the Citrix exams.
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If you’re looking at this website chances are you fall into one of the categories that makes you eligible to buy this software:- consultants, Value Added Resellers to name a couple. It’s available in most countries and roughly at the same price (UK £199+VAT) but alot of people in the industry are unaware of it’s existence. What prompted me into writing this article was seeing someone selling this very information on eBay.

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Windows Vista will be available as a stand alone product or pre-installed on new PCs from January 30th 2007 according to the official Vista website today. Office 2007 will also be available at the same time. In the meantime if you are thinking of buying a PC or laptop now make sure you get one that offers an express upgrade to windows Vista. You must ensure you buy from a participating computer manufacturer between October 26th - March 15th 2007. The bad news is the qualifying PCs must be running Windows XP Media Centre, Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, or Windows XP Professional. Note the lack of XP Home. The list of participating manufacturers includes the big names as you would expect such as Acer, Asus, Dell, Fujitsu, Gateway, HP, Lenovo, Medion, NEC, Sony and Toshiba.

Have you seen the above when typing an ipconfig/all and wondered what it was and how to remove it? I came across it when trying to add a problem laptop to a domain. Oddly even though the account I was using was a domain admin I kept getting an access is denied message. After deciding the error message was misleading and it was more of a network issue I found the “Tunnel adaptor Automatic Tunelling Pseudo-Interface” when I looked at the network details. Here’a a VERY easy way to remove this.

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DNS stub zones are a new feature in Windows 2003 server. What are they, what do they do and are they of any benefit? In this article I try and answer these questions and make the complicated subject of DNS that little bit easier. 

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Shadow copies is another valuable option new to Windows 2003 server. It allows you and even better your users the option to recover files as they were previously, saving you as the administrator both time and resources. Here I discuss how to setup and configure shadow copy and how to use it when you need a file.

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