Desktop Services Team

Further to our previous testing we have continued to monitor changes we have made to the automatic printer deployments. This is currently being tested on a small number of machines to ensure we know the full impact of the changes … Continue reading →

Alongside looking at reviewing and filtering Event Logs we are also working on a set of scripts that can pull back useful information from machines. This can give us information such as the CPU and memory usage, the status of … Continue reading →

Further to our initial investigations we are applying a pair of updates to test machine to address an issue in which system performance can be decreased during scans. This issue has the greatest effect on computers that have a small … Continue reading →

Chrome runs each tab as a separate process running them in complete isolation. This means it can be extremely quick however it does mean that more memory is being used. Even tabs running the background are kept running to allow … Continue reading →

Event logs give a huge amount on information on what is going on within the Windows OS. However filtering out the interesting bits and comparing them across machines can be extremely difficult and time consuming.  We’re in the process of … Continue reading →

We are spending further time looking at the processes and methods used for deploying Windows Updates to our machines, including using the Microsoft Best Practice Analyser to review the server configuration. In particular there is a process that runs locally … Continue reading →

Our desktops machines are almost exclusively Dell OptiPlex machines that are up to 5 years old.  This generally puts us in a very good position with relatively few hardware failures however we can’t rule out problematic hardware causing some of … Continue reading →

We have come up with a number of scenarios to test what happens if we change our current printing setup. We are investigating the consequences of removing the group policy printers policy as we are aware that this increases login … Continue reading →

The machine retrieved from Dartington House was uresponsive during the morning so we ran the following tests to confirm this wasn’t due to hardware fault.   Hard Drive scan – the results showed the hard drive was in working order. … Continue reading →

We’ve installed the MS toolkit on a test machine to allow us to record what is happening on the background on this machine. This will help us see what is going on when the machine becomes unresponsive and also going … Continue reading →