EUT on Tour

The team will be attending the Microsoft Management Summit 2010



We also have updates from Lotusphere 09, Microsoft Management Summit 08, TechEd Europe 08 and the Lotus Leadership Alliance 08


Friday, June 19, 2009

Microsoft Virtual TechEd - Keynote

The ketnote started with a general overview of the thinking behind Windows 7. Specifically mentioned was the user backlash against Vista, and a general feeling that there wasn't much end user or OEM consultation prior to it's release, and it significant performance problems.

Windows 7 was tuned to reduce a lot of the performance bottlenecks and provide a faster user experience. For high end, multi-core CPU systems the scheduling algorithms have been updated to give better performance on those systems too.

Two new tools were specifically demonstrated.

Resource Monitor is a souped-up tool from Task Manager, which can also show more details about running processes, and show which files are open on the file system and how much readings and writing is happening. It can also show what directories are locked (this is searchable too), so you can find out why you can't delete or modify a file.

Memory usage graphic is also a bit more intuitive, showing clearly how much ram is in use for apps, standby caching and spare.

Likewise, Network usage is effectively the TCPView package from SysInternals with a graphical interface, but linked to the process list so you can see which processes have network sessions open, and to where, and what ports are exposed on the machine.

As a side note, Mark Russinovich's machine he was demonstrating did show "Google Updater" as a running program. Make of that what you will. "Apple Mobile Device" was also running, so presumably he's not using a Zune.

The second tool was Problem Steps Recorder, which is designed as a troubleshooting tool for remote helpdesks (ie. you spouse rings you up and says "It's not working!"). If the problem is reproducible, the user can run PSR and reproduce the problem. PSR will capture the screen on every click and keypress, and store the information in a ZIP file which can be e-mailed through to the helpdesk person.

No comments: