For whatever reason Microsoft removed the accessible way of removing hardware profiles in Vista and Windows 7. To help out a collegue with a corrupt profile I made a tiny Powershell script to perform this action. It’s easily done by hand in the registry, the downside is you won’t see the profile descriptions which is a tad errorprone. Also, feel free to use this but I will take no responsibility whatsoever if you use this and you break your Windows install 
# 20091218 – vo.o1 – PZO – Initial hack to delete hardware profiles in Windows Vista/7
#
#————————————————————————————————————————————–
# Let’s see which profiles exist..
#————————————————————————————————————————————–
$i = 0
Write-Host “”
Write-Host “The following hardware profiles have been found on this computer:” -f white
foreach ($profile in (ls -path “HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\IDConfigDB\Hardware Profiles\”) ) {
Write-Host 000$i – (get-itemproperty -path “HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\IDConfigDB\Hardware Profiles\000$i”).FriendlyName
$i++
}
#————————————————————————————————————————————–
# Now we can ask which to remove..
#————————————————————————————————————————————–
Write-Host “”
Write-Host “You are strongly advised not to remove profile 0000 – New Hardware Profile” -f red
Write-Host “”
$input = read-host “Which profile is causing you headaches and should be removed?”
Write-Host “deleting.. “HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Hardware Profiles\$input”"
Remove-Item -Path “HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Hardware Profiles\$input”
Finally: do _not_ remove profile 0000 unless you know what you are doing. YMMV!
[BBG]
While doing a performance test on one of our customer environments we observed the impact of TCP offload and “Receive Side Scaling” (RSS) settings on the interface card on Windows web servers in combination with traffic handling.
Setup:
1. 2x Mercury Load Runner generators hitting public URL of customer
2. Served by 3x Windows2003 SP2 servers, running IIS6
3. Load being balanced by Cisco CSS11503 to web farm.
The CPU performance graph of the web servers with TCP offload and RSS enabled on the internet facing (FRONT) interface:
Similarly but a more outdated graph even more clearly showing that traffic is alternating from one web server to another:
Most interesting right!?
What makes this traffic to alternate if the load balancer has been set up to distribute the load evenly across the farm resp each Load Runner vuser to clear its cookies and session cache after each request?
We then stumbled over this read, knowing that TCP offload to network card is a classic one , but still:
http://blogs.msdn.com/psssql/archive/2010/02/21/tcp-offloading-again.aspx
And found out the characteristic that when TCP offload and RSS were disabled, the load is more evenly spread across the web farm:
I find this pretty cool.
Any comments?
In System Center Operations Manager 2007 you can choose an action account per server. Some management packs provide the possibility to choose a different account for some tasks. However, if you just want to run a specific script with a specific user account, the SCOM environment doesn’t provide default options to choose an account. There is a way to bypass the default behaviour in SCOM 2007 and provide your own account for a specific check.
Find out how
Read more…
