Process Explorer Introduction

Ever wondered which program has a particular file or directory open? Now you can find out. Process Explorer shows you information about which handles and DLLs processes have opened or loaded.

On Wednesday March 5th, Microsoft Technical Fellow Mark Russinovich will be hosting a virtual roundtable session live over the Internet on Windows Vista Deployment and Adoption. Joining Mark on the panel for the roundtable will be independent industry experts and IT Professionals from organizations that have already deployed Windows Vista as well as Microsoft MVPs. This roundtable offers IT Professionals worldwide an opportunity to ask questions about deploying Windows Vista.

When Windows Vista was originally released just over a year ago Microsoft commissioned Principled Technologies to compare the overall responsiveness of Windows Vista to Windows XP SP 2 for some common business and home tasks.

With the release of Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) Principled has updated their results. Principled Technologies concluded the following when comparing business scenarios:

Microsoft Windows Vista : What PC Buyers Choose?
PC buyers choose one version of Microsoft's Windows Vista  operating system over all others.

When you buy your next PC, which version of Windows Vista should you choose?

Microsoft wants to make life difficult for Windows Vista users who don't want to pay, and guide unwitting users of illegal copies back to the straight and narrow. In Service Pack 1 there are hidden antidotes for two frequently used software tricks that activate Vista without a legally acquired licence key. The OEM BIOS hack tricks Vista into thinking that it is installed on a PC made by one of the big manufacturers that has a mass licence. The "Grace Timer Exploit" is used to expand the Vista trial period indefinitely.

Windows Server 2008 or SP1: Which is it?
Microsoft's decision to ship the OS as a service pack takes research firm Gartner by surprise, considering the implications for future updates. Plus: Three features that might make it worth a look.

If you've been having problems copying large files over mapped drives, network disconnects, or having to reboot your router a lot more often than normal, then you can try out this fix to solve the problem.The problem stems from the new auto-tuning network, which changes the receive window on the fly. Thankfully we can easily turn it off from an administrative mode command prompt.

I've always wondered why Windows doesn't allow you to set an arbitrary size for the filesystem cache. What if you have a slow hard drive in your laptop, but loads of available system memory? Shouldn't you be able to maximize that memory in order to speed up hard drive access?

I've found a slightly documented tweak that will allow you to tell Windows to use more cache for the NTFS "pool", which should increase performance if your system opens and closes a lot of files all the time like mine does.

Microsoft has posted a list of applications that will be incompatible with Windows Vista Service Pack 1.

Issues range from performance glitches to software failing to run or start when the service pack is installed.

Several antivirus applications are known to be affected, including BitDefender 10, Jiangmin's KV 10 and KV 2008 and Trend Micro Internet Security 2008.

If you've ever wondered how to configure the number of documents shown on the Recent Items menu, you've found the right article. The default value is set to show 10 documents, but you can increase that with a registry tweak.

What we are changing here is the amount of documents shown in this menu (Here I changed mine down to 1 for illustration)