7zip is one of the best free file compression utilities currently available for download.  Just like its competitors 7zip can handle several different formats for zipping and unzipping of files.  The big thing that makes 7zip stand apart is its own compression standard.  You will usually see about 20-30 percent better compression when using the 7zip standard compared to the other industry standards.  Some of the advanced options include creating self extracting archives and the ability to adjust compression levels.  So if you are looking for a new file compression utility I highly recommend trying it out.  Please let us know what you think.

Main Features From 7zip Site (www.7-zip.org)

  • High compression ratio in 7z format with LZMA and LZMA2 compression
  • Supported formats:
    • Packing / unpacking: 7z, XZ, BZIP2, GZIP, TAR, ZIP and WIM
    • Unpacking only: ARJ, CAB, CHM, CPIO, CramFS, DEB, DMG, FAT, HFS, ISO, LZH, LZMA, MBR, MSI, NSIS, NTFS, RAR, RPM, SquashFS, UDF, VHD, WIM, XAR and Z.
  • For ZIP and GZIP formats, 7-Zip provides a compression ratio that is 2-10 % better than the ratio provided by PKZip and WinZip
  • Strong AES-256 encryption in 7z and ZIP formats
  • Self-extracting capability for 7z format
  • Integration with Windows Shell
  • Powerful File Manager
  • Powerful command line version
  • Plugin for FAR Manager
  • Localizations for 79 languages
7zip Console

7zip Console

7-ZIP Download
http://www.7-zip.org/

 

PAL version 2.1 was released on November 8, 2011.  I just wanted to take a few minutes to create another post so hopefully more people will hear about this great tool.  PAL stands for Performance Analysis Of Logs and is hosted on SourceForge.  Clint Huffman who is a premier field engineer (PFE) for Microsoft is the main contributor to the project.

PAL is used to read performance logs from Windows and analyze them based on thresholds that are set.   From the SourceForge website here are some of the features.

  • Thresholds files for most of the major Microsoft products such as IIS, MOSS, SQL Server, BizTalk, Exchange, and Active Directory.
  • An easy to use GUI interface which makes creating batch files for the PAL.ps1 script.
  • A GUI editor for creating or editing your own threshold files.
  • Creates an HTML based report for ease of copy/pasting into other applications.
  • Analyzes performance counter logs for thresholds using thresholds that change their criteria based on the computer’s role or hardware specs.
In the future plan on looking for some tutorials on how to use PAL.  In the meantime please check out the links below.  If you have used to tool please leave me a comment on how you liked it.
PAL 2.1 By Cling Huffman

PAL 2.1 By Clint Huffman

 

PAL SourceForge Site
http://pal.codeplex.com/

PAL v2.0’s New Counter Generation Feature is Powerful
http://blogs.technet.com/b/clinth/archive/2010/03/02/pal-v2-0-s-new-counter-generation-feature-is-powerful.aspx

 The PAL Tool on Memory Leaks
http://blogs.technet.com/b/clinth/archive/2011/03/28/the-pal-tool-on-memory-leaks.aspx

 

 

System administrators sometimes need to be able to produce a list of drivers that are installed on their system.  Driveryquery.exe is an excellent command line tool from Microsoft to accomplish this.  This tool will give you a report on all of the current device drivers that are loaded on your system.  The command line tool also gives you several options on the information that it will display.  Below is a screenshot that shows all of the options available for running Driverquery.exe.

Driverquery.exe From Microsoft

Driverquery.exe From Microsoft

 

Examples Of Driverquery.exe

This example will pipe the information from driverquery.exe to a txt file on the drive.
C:\driverquery.exe > C:\driverqueyr.txt

This example will format the output into a list view.
C:\driverquery.exe /fo list

This example will turn on verbose output for more information.
C:\driverquery.exe /V

This example will show drivers that are currently running.
C:\driverquery.exe /v | findstr Running

 

© 2011 Server Ninjas Suffusion theme by Sayontan Sinha