The Case of the Crashed Phone Call

David Solomon, my coauthor for the Windows Internals books, was recently in the middle of an important VOIP call on Skype when the audio suddenly garbled. A second later the system blue screened. He called back after the reboot, but a half hour later the person on the other seemed to stop talking mid-word and the system crashed again. The conversation was essentially over anyway, and since he’d… Continue reading

Pushing the Limits of Windows: Virtual Memory

In my first Pushing the Limits of Windows post, I discussed physical memory limits, including the limits imposed by licensing, implementation, and driver compatibility. This time I’m turning my attention to another fundamental resource, virtual memory. Virtual memory separates a program’s view of memory from the system’s physical memory, so an operating system decides when and if to store the program’s code and data in physical memory and when… Continue reading

The Case of the Slooooow System

A few weeks ago my wife complained that her Vista desktop was not responding to her typing or mouse clicks. Given the importance of the customer, I immediately sat down at the system to troubleshoot.  It wasn’t completely hung, but extremely sluggish. For example, the mouse moved and when I clicked on the start button the start menu opened after about 30 seconds. I suspected that something was hogging the… Continue reading

Where in the World is Mark Russinovich?

I haven’t had a chance to write a new post in a while because I’ve been busy working on Windows, new Sysinternals tools and enhancements to existing ones, and the 5th edition of Windows Internals, so I thought that I’d update you on my speaking schedule, book status, and what’s going on at Sysinternals.

My next event is one that anyone can easily attend live, or via recorded webcast… Continue reading

Pushing the Limits of Windows: Physical Memory

This is the first blog post in a series I’ll write over the coming months called Pushing the Limits of Windows that describes how Windows and applications use a particular resource, the licensing and implementation-derived limits of the resource, how to measure the resource’s usage, and how to diagnose leaks. To be able to manage your Windows systems effectively you need to understand how Windows manages physical resources… Continue reading

Guest Post: The Case of the FrontPage Error

Welcome to the first guest “Case Of” blog post! I’ve received numerous great troubleshooting cases over the last two months and have selected this one, submitted by Troy Wolbrink, a corporate web master, as the first to share with you.

Troy ran into a problem with his web server and instead of rebooting, reinstalling, or calling Microsoft Product Support Services (who would have undoubtedly suggested the same steps Troy followed on his

The Case of the Random IE and WMP Crashes

When I experienced a crash in Internet Explorer (IE) on my home 64-bit gaming system one day, I chalked it up to random third-party plug-in memory corruption. I moved on, but a few days later had another crash in IE. Then, Windows Media Player (WMP) started crashing every third or fourth time I used it:

Crashes in different programs seemed to point at a more fundamental problem… Continue reading

The Case of the System Process CPU Spikes

As you’ve probably surmised by my blog posts and other writings, I like knowing exactly what my systems are doing. I want to know if a process is running away with the CPU, causing memory pressure, or hitting the disk. Besides keeping my computers running smoothly, my vigilance sometimes helps me spot performance and reliability problems in Windows and third-party code.

The main way I keep tabs on things is… Continue reading

Inside Vista SP1 File Copy Improvements

Windows Vista SP1 includes a number of enhancements over the original Vista release in the areas of application compatibility, device support, power management, security and reliability. You can see a detailed list of the changes in the Notable Changes in Windows Vista Service Pack 1 whitepaper that you can download here. One of the improvements highlighted in the document is the increased performance of file copying for multiple scenarios

The Case of the Missing AutoPlay

 I’ve been presenting talks on Windows Vista kernel changes since TechEd US in the summer of 2006 and one of the features I cover in the session is ReadyBoost, a write-through disk caching technology that can potentially improve system performance by leveraging flash media as a disk cache. I explain ReadyBoost in depth in my TechNet Magazine article, “Inside the Windows Vista Kernel: Part 2”, but the basic idea is… Continue reading