Windows Home Server - RTM

There was not such a great buzz about this edition (at least not here in Belgium) but nevertheless it is an interesting product. It contains some nice features like a home network health monitor which makes sure all updates are applied on your home PC's, full system restores, automatic backup and many more.

Check out the announcement here and more information here

3GB PAE AWE

I once posted some information about the 3GB, AWE and PAE settings.
Here is some more detailed information about these settings. Definitely worth reading!

Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2

It was very close indeed :-)

Download here - fixlist here

I/O counters in Task Manager

One of my freaky habits is to check the I/O counters in the task manager. Whenever I'm doing I/O intensive stuff I like to quickly look at the MBs processed.

Whether these counters are updated or not is controlled by a registry setting (see below). You can set the value to 0 to disable it or 1 to enable it. Disabling it gives a little performance boost since Windows doesn't have to take care of the counters but on test systems I like to enable it. SQLIOSim also requires it to be enabled to get some of it's results.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\I/O System\CountOperations

By the way, Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 (fixlist) is getting very close. Keep an eye out for it because it contains fixes to improve performance of SQL Server 2005 under heavy load. More details will follow.