If you're willing to get your hands dirty, it's possible to whittle the Windows XP setup files down to the barest essential components needed for just the Recovery Console, which collectively requires less than 10 MB of space. Using this technique, you can put one or more Recovery Console image onto a bootable rescue CD, without having to cart around the whole installation disc image.

If you're willing to get your hands dirty, it's possible to whittle the Windows XP setup files down to the barest essential components needed for just the Recovery Console, which collectively requires less than 10 MB of space. Using this technique, you can put one or more Recovery Console image onto a bootable rescue CD, without having to cart around the whole installation disc image.

Even with all its faults--and there are many, starting with a general industry lack of support--DOS is still the preferred operating environment for building a rescue CD to help bring up a crippled system.

Optimizing PC memory isn't as easy as "just add more," and in fact there are plenty of times when adding more RAM is downright pointless. This article will cover some monitoring tools and techniques that will help you figure out what's really going on with your machine and when you do need to add more RAM.

Surprisingly, hardware monitoring on Windows is much more complicated than it is on Linux. For one thing, there's no single extensible sensor engine like lm_sensors on Linux. Instead, there are a handful of monolithic engines for Windows that each have significant limitations. Worse is that the most extensible engine was abandoned a couple of years ago, while some of the more modern packages are lacking the basic functionality needed for hands-off management and reporting.

Hardware monitoring on Linux is actually pretty straightforward, but like most other things, even the simplest stuff can be complicated. Basically there are three "layers" of software involved, all of which are based around the lm_sensors software package.

Rack-mount Xeon systems can be hard to make cool and quiet.

32-bit Athlon processors need special software to make them consume less energy and shed less heat.

Network policies can be extremely useful to even the smallest of networks, and are easily worth the relatively small amount of effort required to put them into operation. Furthermore, you can deploy Windows policies across any shared filesystem that a networked Windows system can read.

Windows and the applications that run on it use the event log repository to record all kinds of significant system events. Unfortunately, trying to pull information out of multiple event logs in a way that is both timely and usable can be difficult and convoluted. There is a way to use SNMP technology already bundled into Windows to generate lightweight alerts against pre-selected events, however, thus providing the basis for a flexible and scalable notification system that can work with existing network management tools.

The Intelligent Platform Management Interface is a collection of tightly integrated hardware interfaces and network protocols that cumulatively provide a variety of network-enabled system-management hooks. As long as the target system's IPMI network interface is operational, an administrator can connect to the management interface across a network, redirect the server's console to a local management station, collect sampling data and reboot the server, even if there is no operating system loaded on the target server.

Ensuring that your applications, servers and network infrastructure perform optimally depends primarily on how well you plan for deployment. That entails performing a comprehensive audit of your existing systems, building a replacement to meet those needs, testing it, deploying it, and then correcting the inevitible errors.

LinkView Pro 6.0 and WG Examine are W&G's entry into the software-based network analyzer market. Although the this is a solid offering, it is more expensive than competitive products.

The latest version of this traffic analysis software provides a few much-needed improvements, making the upgrade a no-brainer for existing users. But the new features, although attractive, probably aren't enough to get people to switch from competing products.

Caravelle's soon-to-be released IPnetWatcher network-management system is a Java-based, client/server network-monitoring system that, despite the buzzwords, provides a reliable, easy way to proactively administer a network. Although the beta version I looked at was a little rough around the edges, I found the overall product and concept more than usable.