Microsoft Windows has had a built in feature called prefetch for some time now and what prefetch would do was load up your most frequently used programs to memory so that they could launch faster and work more quickly. This was great, except for 1 thing. Windows operating systems prior to Windows Vista were not that aggresive in terms of how much RAM prefetch would use!

Windows Vista has changed this. Many people have asked me about this because their machines are reporting 50 or 60mb free memory. The reason for this is that Microsoft changed Prefetch to SuperFetch and made it a lot more aggresive. This actually makes a lot of sense and when I was reading the article written by the performance team about this it all clicked.

Read the performance teams on Window Superfetch and Readyboost here

http://blogs.technet.com/askperf/archive/2007/03/29/windows-vista-superfetch-readyboost.aspx

There have been a large number of posts and questions about the /3GB switch in the boot.ini file on servers. The performance team explains exactly what this switch does with nice little diagrams of the default address space layout, etc.

Definately worth a read, especially if you have ever used this switch or been advised to do so.

Read the article at http://blogs.technet.com/askperf/archive/2007/03/23/memory-management-demystifying-3gb.aspx

Microsoft releases 6 April 2007 Process Monitor V1.2. (read it at brian madden his site) 

This tool was original created by Sysinternals and later it was acquired by Microsoft. It runs now with integrated reg- and filemonitor.

At least once a week, someone on the Performance team will get a customer call concerning hangs or resource depletion on their file server.  The file server in question is used for user home folder storage and users are accessing Outlook Personal Storage (.pst) files stored on the server from their client.  The issue will manifest as either a server hang, or PagedPool depletion (Event ID 2020).  Oftentimes the issue will occur first thing in the morning - when users are logging on and launching Outlook.  In especially severe cases, the issue occurs several times daily.  Sometimes the server will hang for a few minutes and then continue operating for a few minutes - and then hang again.  Rinse & repeat.  The users are frustrated because of slow access to their data, the server administrators are frustrated because they are tasked with fixing the problem, and upper management is frustrated because everyone else is frustrated.

If you're in this situation - there's good news ... and very bad news.  The good news is that this problem is very common and is a known issue.  The very bad news (from the customer's standpoint) is that PST files on a LAN/WAN is an unsupported configuration.  Some customers are very surprised to hear this but Network Stored PST files have been unsupported since the days of Exchange 4.0.  Microsoft KB Article 297019 goes into some detail about the effects of Network PST files:

Full story: http://blogs.technet.com/askperf/archive/2007/01/21/network-stored-pst-files-don-t-do-it.aspx

Yesterday I received a news letter from Microsoft that the dutch division received the first prototype telephone's of the new IP telephone's. I already worked with voip phone's from CISCO as a user and that looks just like a normal phone with a grey lcd panel in it.