Month: July 2004

http://www.nasdaq.com/asp/quotes_news.asp?cpath=20040712ACQDJON200407121100DOWJONESDJONLINE000430.htm&symbol=MSFT&selected=MSFT&kind=&mode=stock&formtype=&mkttype=&pathname=&page=news

NEW YORK -(Dow Jones)- Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) said Monday it plans to release a key update for its Windows XP operating system in August.

The update, known as Service Pack 2, contains a bundle of new features and security enhancements for Windows XP. It was originally slated to be released to manufacturing in June, but Microsoft pushed back the release and issued a second test version.

Most Windows XP customers will receive Service Pack 2 via a new version of Microsoft’s online update service, Windows Update, said Will Poole, a senior vice president for the Windows business. The company will also provide a free CD to those who don’t have high-speed Internet connections, Poole said in a press release Monday.

Service Pack 2 is part of a broader effort by the Redmond, Wash., company to address concerns about the security of its products and protect Windows users from viruses and hackers. The update will block unsolicited downloads from Web sites and pop-up ads and turn on the Windows personal firewall, among other things.

Windows XP first went on sale in October 2001. Hackers and virus writers have exploited numerous flaws in the ubiquitous operating system and its accompanying Web browser, Internet Explorer. The next Windows version, code named Longhorn, won’t be available until 2006 or later.

Source: http://hellomate.typepad.com/exchange/2004/07/techhit_outlook.html

EZDetach – “Save Attachments – Do you think you could use a little help managing email attachments? EZDetach for Outlook will help you effortlessly extract, remove, save attachments – manually or automatically, from one or multiple messages. It is extremely easy to use, yet very flexible and powerful.”

MessageSave – “Save, Archive and Process Messages – Backup, process, share and save Outlook email messages with MessageSave for Outlook.”

AutoRead – “Mark as Read, Remove New Mail Icon – Do you receive email that doesn’t require immediate attention? AutoRead is an Outlook plugin that will let you automatically mark messages as read and/or remove the Outlook “New Mail” taskbar (tray) notification icon. AutoRead “users report significant productivity gains.”

EZDelete – “Purge Messages – EZDelete places a button on the Outlook toolbar which let’s you delete messages without moving them to the Deleted Items folder with one click of a mouse.”

More info from http://www.techhit.com

 

Source: http://blogs.msdn.com/mfp2/archive/2004/07/09/178840.aspx

A cool little tool was recently posted called “Performance Monitor Wizard” (a.k.a. PerfWiz).  It can be downloaded here.

The Performance Monitor Wizard simplifies the process of gathering performance monitor logs. It configures the correct counters to collect, sample intervals and log file sizes. This wizard can create logs for troubleshooting operating system or Exchange server performance issues.

Additional thoughts… If you have used System Monitor (i.e., Performance Monitor) to collect data, or worse, have had to walk someone over the phone through the steps to do so, or have had to use Q811237, than you know that Perfmon is not the most user-friendly tool.  The current version of Perfmon leaves a lot of room for error when trying to collect important data.  I can’t begin to tell you how many logs I have looked at over the past couple of years that were missing key objects/counters to solve a problem, or the interval was wrong, or the Perfmon log itself was gigantic and hard to open. 

With this tool, you just walk through a series of wizard-based dialog boxes, answer some questions, and then PerfWiz takes care of configuring the Perfmon logs so you never even have to open Perfmon. 

Some of you may have already used this tool while troubleshooting an issue with a PSS Support Engineer.  It actually has been around for a little while, but up until this point was only used by and available through PSS.  Now everyone can have FUN collecting performance counter data!  Hehe!

Keep in mind; this tool is only for system performance data collection; it does not analyze the data; that is still up to you (for now). :)  For help with analyzing the performance data within the logs make sure to follow the appropriate Troubleshooting whitepapers available on the Exchange Performance Tuning webpage: http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/techinfo/administration/finetune.asp 

Oh yeah, I gotta say this about it too… PerfWiz is provided “AS IS” with no warranties. ;)

You just need to Enter the message source and ID in the text field, then click Go

For Exchange 2003 http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/support/2003/ee.asp

For Exchange 2000 http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/support/2000/ee.asp

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/modcore/html/dehowfindingerrorsusingeventviewerpwd.asp