Windows / Server

This is the broadest section of the notes, and deliberately so: it holds both the server operating system — Windows Server 2003 and 2008 — and the client side, Windows XP, Vista and 7. In a small or mid-sized estate the same person owns both, and the notes were written from that position. The material dates from 2007 to 2013.

Why the desktop and the server sit together

An administrator running twenty servers in this period was usually also running two hundred desktops, and the two produce very different kinds of problem. The server notes are about capacity and configuration: enabling networking on a fresh Windows Server 2008 build, scheduling tasks from the command line, installing R2 enhancements on an existing 2003 server. The client notes are about symptoms with no obvious cause — a desktop that will not refresh, a machine that restarts instead of shutting down, an Explorer operation that hangs behind a green progress bar. Both end up in the same notebook because both landed on the same desk on the same morning.

Two long-running threads dominate. The first is disk space and servicing. Windows Vista introduced the component store, and it grew relentlessly as updates and service packs accumulated. That produced the single most cited note in the whole collection, reducing Windows 7 WinSxS folder size, along with the surrounding service-pack and slimming-down posts. The second is the Windows 7 beta, which IIS Hacks covered closely through January 2009 — compatibility, a media-corruption bug, booting the beta from a VHD — and which offers a period view of what testing a major Windows release looked like from outside Microsoft.

Alongside those sit the everyday interventions: disabling or tuning User Account Control across three different mechanisms, recovering desktop icons and shortcuts that vanish, and enabling ping replies on Windows Server 2008, which is where the operating system and the firewall meet.

What has changed since

Windows Server 2003, Windows XP and Windows Vista are all long past end of support, and Windows 7 has followed them. Anything here that touches the update mechanism should be treated with particular care, because that is where these notes are most out of date: the servicing command the WinSxS note relies on, dism /online /cleanup-image /spsuperseded, was superseded by /StartComponentCleanup in later releases, and the current switch set is documented in the DISM servicing command-line options.

What survives is the troubleshooting method: separate the reproducible from the intermittent, change one thing, and prefer a measurement to an opinion about what is slow. Current equivalents of this material live in the Windows Server documentation and the Windows Server troubleshooting guidance.

Notes about disk performance are filed under Hardware, and security-facing operating-system work — password policy, IPsec filtering, rootkit-related crashes — under Security, Viruses, Trojans.

Notes filed under Windows / Server

Linked titles open full notes. Plain titles identify other posts in the category; the full chronological list is available in the complete post index.

18 May 2007 — Setting Processor Affinity Permanently
9 June 2007 — Vista File Operations Slow: Green Bar in Windows Explorer
9 June 2007 — Expanding Start Menu Folders Very Slow in Vista
10 June 2007 — Speed Up a Low-Memory System Running Windows Vista
11 June 2007 — Windows: Scheduling Tasks via Command Line
19 June 2007 — Disabling Windows Search in Vista: Stop Hard Drive Running Constantly
26 June 2007 — Print a Directory Listing in Windows
10 July 2007 — A Few Initial Thoughts on Windows Vista Ultimate
15 July 2007 — Enabling Internet on a Fresh Windows Server 2008 Install
10 August 2007 — Printing: Black Bars Behind PDF / Web Page Text Fields
23 September 2007 — Windows XP Product Lifecycle Update
2 October 2007 — Windows XP Sales Extended to June 30th 2008
5 October 2007 — How to Install Windows Server 2003 R2 Enhancements on Windows Server 2003 SP1
7 November 2007 — Slimming Down a Windows XP Pro SP2 Install
16 November 2007 — Windows XP Automatically Restarts After Shutdown
17 November 2007 — Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 Tab Shortcuts
10 January 2008 — DOS Window Only Half Screen in Windows XP
16 January 2008 — How to Configure a Shared Printer as LPT1 / LPT2 in DOS
17 January 2008 — How to Turn Off the Image Thumbnail File Thumbs.db in Windows XP
19 March 2008 — Windows Vista Counterfeit Changes
19 March 2008 — Windows Vista Service Pack 1 Released: Improvements
24 September 2008 — Change the Colour of the Windows Blue Screen of Death (BSOD)
5 December 2008 — Windows 2008 / Vista Service Pack 2 Beta Download Available Now
9 January 2009 — Download the Official Windows 7 Beta
9 January 2009 — Windows 7 Beta Download: Direct Link From Microsoft
10 January 2009 — Google Chrome 1.x and 2.x Broken in Windows 7 Beta x64
10 January 2009 — Windows 7 Beta 7000 MP3 Corruption and Patch
10 January 2009 — Some Compatible Programs for Windows 7 Beta 7000 x64
11 January 2009 — Install and Boot Windows 7 Beta or Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta on VHD
17 January 2009 — Disable User Account Control (UAC) in Windows 7
28 April 2009 — IE8 Showing as a Critical Update in XP
10 July 2009 — Using taskkill to End Tasks and End Task Manager
12 January 2010 — Creating a Backup and Recovery Plan
24 February 2010 — Windows XP Shuts Down After Login
28 February 2010 — Install the Windows Recovery Console in the Boot List
8 March 2010 — HTML Help: Feature Cannot Be Displayed in Some Programs
10 March 2010 — Add Defragment to the Shell Menu in Windows 7 / Vista
20 July 2010 — Enabling Ping Replies in Windows Server 2008 and R2
23 June 2011 — Reduce Windows 7 WinSxS Folder Size
30 November 2011 — Windows 7 Desktop Icons and Shortcuts Disappearing