Dude where's my PFE?
I was a Premier Field Engineer (PFE) for Microsoft.
How to collect a good boot trace on Windows 7
Assume the following: You have a Windows 7 host that you want to collect a trace from. A good trace....
Author: Jeff Stokes Date: 09/17/2012
Welcome to the Windows Assessment Server from the Windows 8 ADK. Part 1 of X
Fa-La…It’s the magical mystery tour….. Well, not really, but it is the Windows Assessment...
Author: Jeff Stokes Date: 09/07/2012
Windows 8 ADK solves GPO Logon Delay questions, film at 11….
Symptoms: Logons take forever and you’ve collected an xbootmgr/WPR/xperf123/xperfui trace....
Author: Jeff Stokes Date: 07/17/2012
The Dudes view on IT Infrastructure and Sustainability in same.
Hope you enjoy.
Author: Jeff Stokes Date: 07/01/2012
What is Windows Performance Analyzer all about and why should you use it instead of xperfview?
Consider the following trace in xperfview: This should be familiar to you, it’s the DPC storm /...
Author: Jeff Stokes Date: 06/29/2012
PAL 2.3.1 released!
Why? VMware template. Awwww yeah, the Dude strike again. If you are running in...
Author: Jeff Stokes Date: 06/24/2012
When an Exchange Server doesn’t Exchange…
“Well the high sheriff, told his deputy, won’t you go out and bring my Lazarus?” Why am I quoting...
Author: Jeff Stokes Date: 06/24/2012
Ladies and Gentleman (and low lifes), it is with outstanding pleasure tonight that I am able to present to you, the reader, with an xperf trace….
For those who didn’t yet know, the Dude is a fan of old school rap. So one of these days, not...
Author: Jeff Stokes Date: 06/24/2012
Yet another xperf analysis post
Pump up the volume, Pump up the volume… Slow Boot: Yep, that’s slow. Clearly not in CPU usage...
Author: Jeff Stokes Date: 06/24/2012
The dude does xperf…
So the Dude (that’s me) has gone over how to collect xperf traces a few times now, but what do we do...
Author: Jeff Stokes Date: 06/24/2012
PAL 2.3 with Multi-Threading!
PAL (https://pal.codeplex.com/) is a favorite tool of mine, written by Clint Huffman. I’ve...
Author: Jeff Stokes Date: 06/05/2012
Introducing Windows Server 2012 Free e-book available
I highly recommend giving this a read so you are ready for Windows Server 2012. The dude had a...
Author: Jeff Stokes Date: 06/05/2012
The Dude does TechEd 2012 North America and Europe this year.
I’ve got 2 session spots this year: and In North America, I’ll have a guest speaker for AAP303, the...
Author: Jeff Stokes Date: 05/27/2012
RunAsRadio.com spot
Look for the Dudes’ interview with Richard Campbell on RunAsRadio, where I get into a...
Author: Jeff Stokes Date: 05/15/2012
A visit to the SPA
Server Performance Advisor 3.0. We love it, we hate it, we didn’t want to watch the video on...
Author: Jeff Stokes Date: 05/07/2012
TechStravaganza 2012, now with added flair!
In the immortal words of Ali-G, buyakasha! Check it out, TechStravagana 2012 Atlanta is coming soon...
Author: Jeff Stokes Date: 05/07/2012
See you in Orlando in June?
The dude will be in session at TechEd 2012. Waiting to firm up some session information but so...
Author: Jeff Stokes Date: 02/20/2012
Group Policy Sample Script Issue, solved
This is an interesting one-off that we felt would be worth posting. Might help a few folks not...
Author: Jeff Stokes Date: 02/18/2012
Xperf-o-Rama
At the Premier Webcast I ran today I was asked a couple times if I could link some ‘getting...
Author: Jeff Stokes Date: 12/05/2011
How to sustain your data collector set through a reboot!
This is a special post, from the Microsoft Premier Field Engineers (PFE) Vital Signs Instructors...
Author: Jeff Stokes Date: 11/16/2011
How to apply a bios update to the HP 8540w
I am primarily posting this to increase visibility. I had many problems trying to apply the...
Author: Jeff Stokes Date: 11/15/2011
Pal 2.1 is released
My buddy Clint Huffman, performance expert and all around great guy, has just released PAL 2.1!...
Author: Jeff Stokes Date: 11/08/2011
How to setup a rolling 200 meg log file in 2003 with a PAL template that sustains reboots
1. Get a PAL template or other perfmon template. You can run PAL at pal.codeplex.com or...
Author: Jeff Stokes Date: 10/31/2011
The Dude’s Greatest Hits
As requested by several customers, I’m putting up a list of tools I find useful in troubleshooting,...
Author: Jeff Stokes Date: 09/24/2011
How I stand up a new MDT environment, Part 7
Ok, break time is over yo…. Step 5 The Task Sequence magic So lets do another properties on our Task...
Author: Jeff Stokes Date: 07/21/2011
How I stand up a new MDT environment, Part 6
Step 4.1 The Task Sequence magic Now that the Task Sequences are created, its important to note you...
Author: Jeff Stokes Date: 07/11/2011
How I stand up a new MDT environment, Part 5
Step 4. Task Sequences So now with Operating Systems and Applications added to the console,...
Author: Jeff Stokes Date: 07/10/2011
How I stand up a new MDT environment, Part 4
Step 3.1 App Bundles So at this point you’ve imported/added your applications and are wondering why...
Author: Jeff Stokes Date: 07/10/2011
How I stand up a new MDT environment, Part 3
Step 3. Here come the apps! Much like the Operating System area, in the Application area we...
Author: Jeff Stokes Date: 07/10/2011
How I stand up a new MDT environment, Part 2
Step 2. Import OS into the reference share So mount an ISO of the OS you want to...
Author: Jeff Stokes Date: 07/10/2011
How I stand up a new MDT environment, Part 1
There are many MDT environment setups, this one is mine. Step .1 Pre-Flight I use a...
Author: Jeff Stokes Date: 07/10/2011
How to collect a netmon 3.4 and xperf kernel trace and stop when a problem occurs.
So at a customer location the following question was posed to me: “In our VDI environment, how do we...
Author: Jeff Stokes Date: 07/07/2011
What do you do when you want to run Windows XP on a Solid State Drive?
1. #1 THE BIG UNO! Properly align your partition with diskpar/diskpart and THEN...
Author: Jeff Stokes Date: 05/20/2011
High Privileged Mode CPU on 1 of 64 cores–quick fix
I was contacted recently about a server with 64 cores that, with no work load, had one core, ordinal...
Author: Jeff Stokes Date: 05/12/2011
33 Seconds lost at boot…
Imagine you are an enterprise customer who has several thousand desktops that boot slow. ...
Author: Jeff Stokes Date: 04/24/2011
Disk in-Depth
I started an article on Disk performance and characteristics for the PFE Performance Wiki a while...
Author: Jeff Stokes Date: 02/23/2011
DPC triangle…
So once upon a time, a PFE had a problem with his video game stuttering. The game would be...
Author: Jeff Stokes Date: 02/18/2011
RunAsRadio.com
I just realized I forgot to link to my xperf into talk on RunAsRadio.com back in October. Boy...
Author: Jeff Stokes Date: 02/04/2011
Yes, it matters
Often at customer engagements when I encourage them to use things like SCCM and SCUP along with HP...
Author: Jeff Stokes Date: 02/04/2011
Boot delay in MOM 2005 Agent - notes from the field
Mom2005 agent for FCS v1 can slow boot times by around 20 seconds (typically)...So I did a WDRAP...
Author: Jeff Stokes Date: 01/31/2011
The David Solomon TechNet Spotlight Talks are online once again!
As some would say…Mission Accomplished. It’s a long story, but I use these videos,...
Author: Jeff Stokes Date: 10/16/2010
Troubleshooting slow boot times, Part Deux
In my last session, I covered a rudimentary usage of XPERF to analyze my slow booting Dell with a...
Author: Jeff Stokes Date: 10/11/2010
The effects of Acoustic Management on rotational media disks.
So one of the trends I’ve been seeing in WDRAPs I’ve performed is that companies are...
Author: Jeff Stokes Date: 10/11/2010
To Hyper-Thread or not, that is the question….
So there was some discussion on an internal alias recently, like, well, this morning at 6...
Author: Jeff Stokes Date: 09/15/2010
Anti-Virus Exclusions and You!
So there is some amount of confusion on what exclusions are needed for various Microsoft...
Author: Jeff Stokes Date: 05/28/2010