Note: this content originally from http://mygreenpaste.blogspot.com. If you are reading it from some other site, please take the time to visit My Green Paste, Inc. Thank you.

OK, so perhaps chaos is a bit of a harsh word here. But the clipboard was recently driving me nuts! All I was trying to do was copy some text to it, and the operation was failing. Of course, as it was an ad hoc app, I didn't have any kind of error handling. The app worked just fine on one system, but running the app on another system (a virtual machine) consistently resulted in failure to copy the text to the clipboard.

Ultimately, I was able to determine what process was preventing my app from putting data in the clipboard, but I haven't yet found a decent workaround for when the problem happens. It's not critical for me, as the act of copying the text to the clipboard is more of a nicety than a requirement.

Anyway, using P/Invoke and System.Diagnostics, I found that vmusrvc.exe - the Virtual PC "Virtual Machine User Services" - had the clipboard open. Using the timestamps from Process Monitor's Profiling Events

Note: this content originally from http://mygreenpaste.blogspot.com. If you are reading it from some other site, please take the time to visit My Green Paste, Inc. Thank you.

Recently, an individual going by the moniker 'hi' posted a comment to Setting the Priority of a Service Process via Script:

How would I, if I want to, find which services are part of a particular svchost.exe? Can in be done in C#?

Thanks!

I replied via comment, but one has even less control over formatting in comments than one does in the actual blog posting, so I figured I would post the response here as well.

=================

Tasklist.exe with the /svc param can tell you, as can Process Explorer. You can also inspect the registry to determine what services would load with what SVCHOST group (see "Troubleshooting Performance Issues with Automatic Updates" for more details).

As far as C# code, the following requires a reference to System.Management. Invoke the program, passing it the process id of the process you're curious about, and it will output the services running in that process.

using System;
using System.Management;

namespace MyGreenPaste
{
  class

Too much Windows Vista cache, a bad ting? Well, apparently yes, through Excessive Cached Write I/O and Excessive Cached Read I/O. As you probably know by now, cache is connected with boosting the performance of data accessing processes that target sluggish storage media. In an ideal scenario, the data or the code pages would be completely located within the system memory. The speed at which data is accessed, in the physical RAM, exceeds by far that of similar processes that involve a hard disk, by approximately 1 million times. But, because of the usually limited amount of RAM, the operating system will have to deal with system cache. (more…)

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Although it is virtually handicapped in terms of the options it actually provides to the user in comparison to Windows XP, the hard disk defragmentation utility in Windows Vista is an evolution of the equivalent from the predecessor operating system. But the enhancements come essentially under the hood of the tool. In this context, the actual defragmentation engine was tuned up, as well as the management of the fragmentation process.

“By default, the defrag tool only defragments files smaller than 64 megabytes (MB). Therefore, files larger than 64 MB are not moved unnecessarily. In earlier versions of Windows operating systems, if the defrag engine was in the middle of a large move request, it could take lots of time to cancel defragmentation. In Windows Vista, the defrag engine processes input and output requests in smaller portions. Therefore, you can avoid situations where the defrag engine is busy with processing large move requests when you cancel a defragmentation session”, Microsoft explained. (more…)

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When troubleshooting any version of Windows, learning what applications and processes are loading on startup is a critical step. To this end, the old and faithful MSCONFIG application is a great help, and it’s definitely present in Windows Vista too. Just go Start, Run, MSCONFIG and you’re there.

However times change, and while MSCONFIG is a very useful little utility, there are better options available. Enter Autoruns. Developed by Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell of Winternals (now Sysinternals and owned by Microsoft), Autoruns is a fantastic freeware app which does a full scan of your system and presents you with a total rundown of everything that happens on system startup and system logon. (more…)

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Every once in a while you notice that your hard drive is working extra hard for what seems like no reason. A background process has taken your hard drive hostage, forcing it to thrash loudly as it struggles to keep up with the high rate of reads and writes. Your computer responds slowly as the process overloads the physical limitations of your drive. What are you to do?

The solution is simple, although a little tricky at times: identify and stop the process that is killing your drive. There are two methods and tools that you can use to identify the process. (more…)

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