Like most other techies, whenever I install Adobe’s Acrobat Reader I also uninstall most of the pointless plugins, to speed up its dog-slow startup process. If you want to learn more about speeding up Adobe Reader 6.0, just ask Tim or Chris or Greg or...

Check out the new wiki pages that the MSN Search team have created on Channel 9 ! This is a one-stop community information resource for everything and anything to do with MSN Search – the web search engine , the desktop search tool , bug reports, feature...

Ok, first I said that you really only needed to subscribe to Eileen Brown and Rod Trent for all of your SMS and MOM needs. Then my bosses’ boss started blogging , and it would be foolhardy of me to tell you to ignore him! Now James Morey has arrived...

Many Windows client applications can iconify themselves to the system tray instead of taking up an entry on your taskbar. I love this feature for apps that I keep around all day, because it means that I always know where to find them — they're in the...

My “grand-manager” Brad Anderson has started a blog on myITforum. Although it’s really half a blog, since he’s sharing it with Bill Anderson. And of course he hasn’t actually posted anything yet . But these are minor quibbles...

A quick follow-up to four points, since " Dogfooding MSN Desktop Search " seems to be getting a lot of attention. First, Joe Wilcox of Jupiter Research is disappointed with the initial indexing speed of desktop search, because it took 2.5 hours to...

The new MSN Desktop Search tool represents the combined efforts of several different search teams within Microsoft, some of which have shown their tools externally (e.g. MSR’s Stuff I’ve Seen ), and all of which have had their own internal beta programs...

Answering your individual emails about offline files is a thankless task, since (a) I’m not tech support, so you’re not going to get any kind of “official” response, (b) I don’t scale out, so other readers of this blog won’t benefit from any pearls of...

My favorite talk at CMG yesterday was “A Performance Process Maturity Model”, given by Michael Maddox of MCI. You've probably already heard of the Capability Maturity Model (CMM), which is used extensively in the software industry to measure the “quality...

In case you missed this story when it hit the headlines last month, one of the UK’s major government departments lost the use of most of its desktop PCs for nearly a week. Now we’re seeing more details on the causes of the outage: EDS has...

As I said , I’m going to start leaving it to Rod Trent and Eileen Brown to handle the weekly news about MOM and SMS. So go visit Rod to learn about: Registration for MMS 2005 (April 18 th -22 nd 2005 at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas!) Vintela’s...

If you can only attend one conference each year about capacity planning and performance modeling, the Computer Measurement’s Group week-long event is probably the one to choose. And so I’ll be blogging from CMG 2004 in Las Vegas for the next...

Back when I started out , I was the only blogger in the WEMD organization, and I took it upon myself to post our weekly news , as well as the monthly “Management Updates” newsletters. Now there are nine other blogs in the SMS & MOM category on the...

I’ve posted another month’s worth of marketing prose over at the Management Updates blog , but hopefully you’ve already seen most of these announcements before: SMS SMS 2003 OS Deployment Feature Pack SMS 2003 Device Management Feature...

After my two previous posts on debugging offline files, I’ve had four requests via comments and email, all saying pretty much the same thing: “why do offline files stop working after I restart my computer?” The most visible symptom is that the “Enable...

Unless you’ve been living under a rock tonight, you already know that MSN Spaces just launched. I’ve started a personal space, but for now I’ll keep all the technical content right here - it’s just too damn shiny over there…