Diagnosing a Performance Hit to Your System

Diagnosing a Performance Hit to Your System

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1. Commentary - Diagnosing a Performance Hit to Your System

2. Reader Challenge - April Reader Challenge Answer

3. News & Views - Microsoft-EU Hearing Turns to Competitive Issues

4. Resources - Tip: Fixing Permissions on Shared Folders - Featured Thread: Use the Command Line, Luke

5. New and Improved - N and I: Sowsoft Network Password Manager 2.0 - Tell Us About a Hot Product and Get a T-Shirt!

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==== 1. Commentary: Diagnosing a Performance Hit to Your System ==== by David Chernicoff, david@windowsitpro.com

It's not uncommon for a friend or a client to call me and complain that a computer has slowed down and taken a noticeable performance hit. Fortunately, I can usually walk the caller through the diagnostic process over the phone.

A few years ago, my first question would have been, "Have you defragged the hard disk lately?" I still advise checking that, but now my first question is, "Have you checked the computer for spyware or virus infection and made sure the system is clean?" I might also ask the user to reboot the computer and bring up Task Manager to look for things that don't belong. Sometimes, the user has added software to the Startup folder or registry entries that causes additional and unnecessary system overhead.

At this point, I'll ask if the system shows a noticeable decrease in performance or whether the slowdown happens over time (both conditions require the steps outlined below). Then I'll walk the user through the application startup. Often, I'll find that application requirements simply exceed hardware capabilities?for example, users loading graphic- editing software onto systems with less than 512MB of RAM (an extreme example) while other applications continue to load as background processes.

I've learned to ask about basic system configuration; many users buy discounted systems without enough memory to run business applications, or users will preload so much stuff that runs at boot time that the computer handicaps itself. My experience has shown that the inexpensive hard disks in entry-level computers and storage devices have a notable failure rate, so I'll ask the user to check the health of the hard disk. The more technically astute have already brought up Microsoft Management Console (MMC) with the Disk Management snap-in loaded and ready to go. The problem is that you can't trust the Disk Management snap-in when it simply states that a disk is "Healthy." To properly use the snap-in to check the health of a disk, you need to right-click the drive and select Properties, then click the Tools tab and select Error- checking. Then, select both "Check disk" options ("Automatically fix file system errors" and "Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors") and click the Start button.

This process can take a long time to run when the disk is experiencing problems. You can also run this process by typing

chkdsk <drive> /F

in the command line. Lately, I've found disk-corruption errors causing system slowdown in almost 30 percent of the hardware problems I've dealt with.

Although Chkdsk repairs often solve the existing problem, disk- corruption errors are frequently an early warning of impending disk failure, so I always suggest a complete backup and careful monitoring of the disk in question. Irregularly occurring hardware problems can often create significant performance hits and should be considered early in the troubleshooting process as a likely cause.

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==== 2. Reader Challenge ==== by Kathy Ivens, challenge@windowsitpro.com

The April 2006 Reader Challenge and Answers:

I recently participated in a panel discussion at a seminar for local IT administrators. As usual, the most interesting conversations were during the coffee breaks. This month's challenge is drawn from one of the conversations I overheard while scarfing down some delicious cheese Danish.

One participant said to another, "We're invoking POLP, but we need to figure out a way to force the use of Run As for some applications."

Question 1: What does POLP stand for?

Question 2: How do you force the use of Run As when launching an application?

Answer to #1: POLP stands for Principle of Least Privilege. Using POLP means that each user should log on with a user account that has the absolute minimum permissions necessary to complete the user's regular tasks. This helps provide protection against malicious code and Internet intruder attacks. If a user logs on with a privileged account (e.g., one that has administrative privileges on the local machine or on the domain), and a virus executes, the virus will have administrative access to the local computer or to the entire domain. However, if the user logs on with a non-privileged account, the amount of damage that malware can do is limited.

Answer to #2: To force a Run As dialog to appear when a user clicks a shortcut to open a program that requires elevated privileges, change the properties of the shortcut (which might be on the desktop, Quick Launch toolbar, or Programs menu). Right-click the shortcut, choose Properties, and make the following changes in the Properties dialog:

In Windows XP, click Advanced and select the option Run With Different Credentials. In Windows 2000, select the option labeled Run As Different User.

Don't forget to tell users how to fill out the Run As dialog: They'll need to know the domain name and user name (of a privileged user) and the user password. They also need to know that the user name is entered in the format Domain\UserName (unless it's a Windows Workgroup, in which case only the Username is entered, and that name must exist as a local user).

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==== 3. News & Views ==== by Paul Thurrott, thurrott@windowsitpro.com

Microsoft-EU Hearing Turns to Competitive Issues

On day four of the Microsoft antitrust hearings in the European Union (EU) Court of First Instance, the debate turned to esoteric and secretive information that Microsoft is trying to keep from its competitors. Microsoft is trying to limit the amount of technical information it provides to competitors--a major concern of the 2004 EU antitrust ruling. Microsoft rivals are arguing that the software giant is simply trying to harm competition and force its rivals to take the time and effort to reverse-engineer their software interfaces.

"The information isn't kept secret because it's valuable," said James Flynn, a lawyer for the European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS), an industry group representing IBM, Oracle, and Sun Microsystems. "It's valuable because it's kept secret." A lawyer representing the open-source Samba project, which seeks to make Microsoft's networking functionality interoperable with open-source solutions, said that Microsoft could have "provided us with a very large part of the information required by the commission ... on a single floppy disk." Instead, Microsoft has fought the information- disclosure requirement for two years. Meanwhile, Samba lags behind Microsoft's networking implementation by "more than 10 years," according to Samba project founder Andrew Tridgell.

Microsoft says it hasn't exaggerated the importance of keeping some information secret. "We don't believe [we can meet this EU requirement] without disclosing certain algorithms," Microsoft attorney Ian Forrestor told the panel of 13 judges. However, Microsoft was quick to offer up the entire source code to Windows, which the EU never asked for.

Curiously, it was a witness from the prosecution, an engineer from Fujitsu, who cut to the heart of the matter. Microsoft's rivals, he said, "just want to be able to connect" to Microsoft's products. Good documentation would describe how to make these connections without revealing how Microsoft accomplished it through software. "It's axiomatic in our industry that specifications, properly written, don't reveal the design and shouldn't reveal the design," he said. In other words, Microsoft can protect its patented and copyrighted software code all it wants; competitors simply want the information necessary to interoperate with Microsoft's software.

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==== 4. Resources ====

Tip - Fixing Permissions on Shared Folders

I've heard from readers and I've seen firsthand that various security and networking applications will make previously available shared folders on a Windows XP computer unavailable to users from other computers, even though it appears that permissions have been set correctly to allow the network shares to be hosted. When you attempt to access a previously shared folder, the system generates a message such as "<Computer Name> is not accessible. You may not have permission to use this network resource."

The problem is that the application the user is running has reset the registry value for restrictanonymous to 1 from 0. To change the value back, perform the following steps:

1. Launch the registry editor. 2. Open HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\LSA. 3. In the right pane, double-click the restrictanonymous value. 4. Change the data value to 0. 5. Exit the registry editor. 6. Reboot the computer. --David Chernicoff

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