Kirkian Computing

Tag: windows

  • Windows Vista: first impressions

    Two weeks ago I went off to a Microsoft event in Reading: “Ready for a New Day: Microsoft’s Launch of Exchange, Office and Vista”. That was quite interesting, and I came away thinking that there are enough useful features to justify an upgrade. They gave me a freebie copy of Windows Vista and Office 2007 for attending; that’s quite a nice touch, especially since the event itself was free. Now that I’ve been doing some presenting myself, I could sympathise with the people at the front when their demos didn’t quite work properly, and I particularly liked the heartfelt cry of “Thank you, demo gods!” when something went smoothly.

    Speaking of Vista, I recently received an email from Microsoft, offering me a place on a beta certification exam. I passed the MCDST exams for Windows XP a couple of years ago and Microsoft are now preparing the equivalent MCITP qualification for Windows Vista. The idea of the beta exam is that they can get an idea of whether the questions are too easy/difficult by trying them out on people with a (roughly) known skill level. Anyway, I’m flattered to be invited, and it’s a free exam, so I’ve signed up for that on 5th January. The only snag is that there aren’t any study guides etc. available yet (the people who write them will probably be doing the beta exams too), so I’ll need to prepare for it on my own. Still, I’ve passed all my previous Microsoft exams on my first attempt (8 so far), so I’m quietly confident about this one.

    Vista won’t be available as a retail product until January 27th, and Microsoft haven’t sent out any DVDs to business customers yet, but companies with volume licencing deals can download it. I’ve been playing with it on my home machine, so that I can get a feel for it before I do any big deployments at work; here are my thoughts so far.

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  • Event Viewer problems

    I’m currently spending an exciting Friday night in the office. Specifically, I’ve been fixing a Windows 2000 PC that’s been running extremely slowly for the past few days. I’ve got that problem solved now (I’m just sticking around to do general maintenance on it), and I thought it was worth documenting here, in case anyone else encounters it.

    Problem:
    PC running Windows 2000 Pro with SP4 is extremely slow.

    Symptoms:
    services.exe taking 99% or 100% of CPU time.
    Can’t run Event Viewer.
    In Admin Tools | Services, the “Event Log” service says “Starting”.

    Cause:
    One or more of the event viewer log files was corrupt, so the service couldn’t start, and therefore the application couldn’t run. But the service didn’t fail either, it just kept retrying, which meant that it was tying up the whole CPU.

    Solution:
    Change the startup type of that service to “Manual”, then reboot the computer. After rebooting, delete *.evt from C:\WinNT\system32\config (or just move them to a spare folder), and start the service manually. If this works (which it did in this case), it will recreate the three files, and then you should change the service’s startup type back to “Automatic”.

    Further info:
    In this case, two of the three files had a size of 512kb. When the service had restarted, I ran Event Viewer, and looked at the properties for each of the logs. They all had a maximum size of 512kb, and they were also configured to overwrite events after 7 days. I’ve changed this setting to be “Override events as needed”. My theory is that the files got corrupted because Windows tried to add new events, but it had run out of space, and it couldn’t delete the old entries because they were less than 7 days old. Normally this would just give an error message on the screen, but I think it’s best to avoid this configuration in general (I really don’t know why Microsoft made this the default). So, if you’re working on any other machines, take a minute to change this setting over.