Letting data pile up may feel safer than deleting it, but unchecked accumulation can make backups slower, costlier and harder to recover when something goes wrong.
Brien Posey explains how to convert an expired Windows Server evaluation VM into a production server using DISM and proper license activation steps.
Using Hyper-V differencing disks, administrators can quickly spin up and reset fully configured lab environments without rebuilding VMs from scratch.
Here's how to convert an expired Windows Server evaluation VM into a production-ready server without rebuilding it from scratch.
A week after Microsoft Fabric's worldwide network-access issue, customers still have little information about what caused the outage or how Microsoft plans to prevent a repeat.
- By Joey D'Antoni
- 05/26/2026
A practical workaround shows how PowerShell developers can keep Windows Forms GUIs responsive by moving timer-driven processing into background jobs and using a second timer to update the interface only after the work is complete.
Brien Posey explains why PowerShell timers can cause Windows Forms dashboards to freeze or fail to update, and why keeping GUI scripts responsive requires a different approach to timed events.
As SQL Server 2016 approaches end of support in July 2026, a look back at its groundbreaking innovations reveals how it reshaped Microsoft's data platform and why it's time to move forward.
- By Joey D'Antoni
- 05/12/2026
Here's a look at five common PowerShell function mistakes that can make scripts harder to read, troubleshoot and reuse.
A PowerShell-based Hyper-V health check can be automated through Task Scheduler to provide a daily status report while also running hourly in silent mode unless a problem is detected.
A PowerShell-based Hyper-V health monitor can give admins a quick, color-coded view of host, VM, replication, disk and memory issues before they become larger problems.
A failed Hyper-V replication setup prompts a PowerShell-based approach to building lightweight, do-it-yourself health monitoring without the cost or complexity of an enterprise-grade tool
An experiment with Microsoft Copilot shows AI can turn fragmented notes into a surprisingly coherent and plausible first-person narrative -- though it still falls short in length, voice accuracy, and fully capturing lived experience.
Microsoft’s new Azure database savings plans promise more flexible, cross-service cost reductions than traditional reservations, giving IT teams another lever to manage rising cloud database spend while preserving deployment options across regions and platforms.
- By Joey D'Antoni
- 04/10/2026
Recent SQL Server 2025, Azure SQL, SSMS 22 and Fabric announcements highlight new event streaming and vector search capabilities, plus expanding monitoring and ontology tooling -- with tradeoffs in platform packaging.
- By Joey D'Antoni
- 04/07/2026
SD cards may be cheap and portable, but their limited write endurance, greater risk of corruption and physical loss, uneven long-term reliability, and poor cost-per-capacity make them a weak choice for dependable data backups.
Brien Posey explains how Microsoft Word's transcription and read-aloud features became a surprisingly practical way to sort, edit and refine AI-generated podcast audio created with Microsoft 365 Copilot Notebooks.
While Hyper-V largely handles NUMA placement automatically, admins can still hurt VM performance by overallocating virtual CPUs past a single physical CPU's core count, making it important to size VMs to stay within one NUMA node when possible.
NUMA in Hyper-V isn't something you have to master--it's something you need to avoid accidentally breaking, and understanding a host's NUMA layout helps you do that.
Here are some practical version-control habits for PowerShell scripts, including separating change types, retaining old versions and embedding version details in script headers or app interfaces.