Some Notes on the Machines

Many old friends, e.g. Hiren’s and UBCD4Win, are no longer in development, and do not boot on quite a lot of newer hardware; for a while there was no clear replacement. The only one known to this writer that works well on current made-for-10 hardware, is Medicat:

gbatemp.net/threads/medicat-dvd-a-multiboot-linux-dvd.361577/

Received these from outside input for servers, not confirmed, unclear when and when not to use these. Have seen some acceleration on servers.

netsh int tcp set global chimney=disabled
netsh int tcp set global rss=disabled
netsh int ip set global taskoffload=disabled
netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled
netsh int tcp set global congestionprovider=none
netsh int tcp set global ecncapability=disabled
netsh int tcp set global timestamps=disabled

Apparently, not only is there SMB1, SMB2, and SMB3, but there is also NTLMv1 and NTLMv2. If we need to access older NASes and the like reliably, we may need to create or set this DWORD:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa\LmCompatibilityLevel

to 1.

By far, ‘guvcview’, “GTK+ UVC Viewer”:

http://guvcview.sourceforge.net/

Chooses from any of the audio devices on the machine, of any sort, including JACK audio sources; chooses from any video capture device; and combines the result. Simple to use and extremely effective. Only one I found to do all of this reliably, out of many.

For a very long time, it was thought gospel that Outlook had hard caps on size of PST and OST files, which equals a hard cap on the size of a mailbox that Outlook can see. This has, apparently, changed. 100-gigabyte OSTs are possible, and larger. It is thought that very fast hard drives primarily, and certainly also good CPU and lots of RAM, are needed to reliably handle huge mailboxes and PSTs without corruption. Here is a method by registry entries. It’s also possible by Group Policy.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/832925/how-to-configure-the-size-limit-for-both—pst-and—ost-files-in-outloo

https://www.msoutlook.info/question/increase-pst-file-size-limit

Today it was found that an Office 2019 installation via 365, did not have any of the registry keys involved. After creating them manually in Regedit, the desired results did occur. These very registry entries are also created by the Group Policy method.

Once you install the Office 2016 templates:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=49030

you can set the maximum sizes:

This creates the same registry entries as the manual method.

Mysteries abound about AzCopy, not the least being the fact that there is a version 10 and a version 8.1. Items as of this writing:

• Version 8.1 is downloadable from Office 365, and works. Have no clue what 10 is for.
• Usage and download of it, is now through Office 365 Security & Compliance, Information Governance, Import.
• When you run it for an upload, add “/NC:2” to the end of the command line. This increases its speed and stability quite a lot, and prevents timeouts.
• If it times out, just restart it, it will continue where it left off.

If the above works for you, use the same number when downloading PSTs from eDiscovery, via registry edit:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/increase-download-speeds-when-exporting-ediscovery-results?view=o365-worldwide

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Exchange\Client\eDiscovery\ExportTool]
"DownloadConcurrency"="2"

An in-script fix:

[Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [Net.SecurityProtocolType]::Tls12

A permanent fix:

Set-ItemProperty -Path 'HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\.NetFramework\v4.0.30319' -Name 'SchUseStrongCrypto' -Value '1' -Type DWord
Set-ItemProperty -Path 'HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\.NetFramework\v4.0.30319' -Name 'SchUseStrongCrypto' -Value '1' -Type DWord

An excellent test recommended by Watchguard:

https://speedof.me

A very good one:

https://testmy.net/SmarTest/combinedAuto

and another:

https://sourceforge.net/speedtest/

Here’s the first one we saw which was HTML5 only, no Flash or Java:

http://www.bandwidthplace.com

Here’s a commonly used one which requires Flash:

http://www.speedtest.net

And another which uses java:

http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/

This can sometimes save a lot of CPU and/or disk cycles.

GUI:

1. Open the Task Scheduler
2. Open Task Scheduler Library, Microsoft, Windows, Application Experience.
3. Disable Microsoft Compatibility Appraiser, with a right-click choice.

CMD:

schtasks /Change /Disable /TN "Microsoft\Windows\Application Experience\Microsoft Compatibility Appraiser"