Some Notes on the Machines

These steps change quite often, fair warning!

Steps below are as of 2021-01-04. Please note this has to be done in Internet Explorer or Edge.

First, set permissions.

1. Browse to protection.office.com/homepage , log in as tenant administrator
2. Click eDiscovery Manager.
3. Open eDiscovery Administrator, and add your current admin user.

It takes one hour (as of Microsoft support 2021-01-04) for the permissions to take effect. Used to be up to 24. Afterwards, perform the export.

4. Browse to protection.office.com/homepage , log in as tenant administrator
5. In left pane, click Search, then click Content Search
6. Click New Search
7. At bottom, item Specific locations, click Modify
8. At top left, Exchange email, click “Choose users, groups, or teams”
9. Click “Choose users, groups, or teams” in the new window
10. Enter mailbox email address, wait until the search results come
11. Check the mailbox, and click Choose, then Done
12. Click Save
13. Click Save & run
14. Name the query (and PST), click Save. The query will run. Don’t continue until it’s done. It will say “Status: completed” at the lower left.
15. Click on the word “More” at the top, just to the left of the word “Sort”.
16. Click on “Export results”. Choose options appropriately. Click Export.
17. Click on “Exports” above that area, to the right of “Searches”. If the export does not appear, click on Refresh.
18. Click on the export item.
19. Click on “Download results”. A download applet will start, requiring an export key which can be copied from the browser. Paste it in, choose your download destination, and go! It can take a very long time to start, there is a long preparation phase.

To see if there is cleanup to be done:

DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /AnalyzeComponentStore

To remove obsolete and unused system files:

DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /StartComponentCleanup

To remove obsolete and unused system files and also service pack uninstallation files:

dism /online /Cleanup-Image /SPSuperseded

To remove obsolete and unused system files and everything prior, making it impossible to reverse any patches:

dism /online /Cleanup-Image /StartComponentCleanup /ResetBase

This:

wmic product where "name like 'Java%%'" call uninstall /nointeractive

appears to work very well for products whose names start with “Java” which are installed in Windows standard fashion.

If MMC for any Windows administrative tool gets stuck, delete everything here:

C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\MMC

Solves issues with updating Windows 10.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4023057/update-reliability

If (when) Outlook bogs down, especially when dealing with multiple accounts in a single profile, disable the existing Send/Receive Group and create a new one, make sure all accounts are included, then set that one to be checked every 30 minutes.

There are links on this page:

https://www.itechtics.com/windows-10-1909/

Here is a very good comprehensive step-by-step discussion:

pixelprivacy.com/resources/best-wi-fi-channel/

Mac is listed first, but Windows is well-discussed after, a Linux command-line (!) method is nicely explained afterward, and Android and iPhone afterwards.

The only item I might suggest, is that the 5 GHz band can sometimes produce far better performance, depending on many factors, including the makeup of walls, if and only if both the WAP and all client devices support 5 GHz. I don’t buy or recommend WAPs which do either/or though, just both, and on a client, if I get 4 bars with 5 GHz and 5 bars with 2.4 GHz, I generally see better throughput on the 5 GHz.

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/

If you are checking this for wifi, we do recommend that you check for and rectify wifi channel congestion as a next step.

The MMCSS (not sure why the extra letters) is a service in Vista (SP1+), 7, Server 2008, and Server 2008R2, which places priority on video and audio data. Here are some good tweaks. Click here for a VBS script, called MCSO, which does everything below automatically.

So we go here in the registry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Multimedia\SystemProfile

open the item named “NetworkThrottlingIndex”, and change it to “FFFFFFFF” (that’s eight F’s) hex. We can do the same for “SystemResponsiveness”.

Then drill further down to here:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Multimedia\SystemProfile\Tasks

and you’ll see a list of folders. Each folder is a “multimedia profile” according to one reference. Each can contain the following:

Affinity        dword:00000000
Background Only        False
BackgroundPriority        dword:00000001
Clock Rate       dword:00002710
GPU Priority        dword:00000001
Priority       dword:00000001
Scheduling Category       High
SFIO Priority       High

I kept the “Window Manager” set at the default, and set the rest to the above. According to one reference it is possible to create custom multimedia profiles and use some applications’ capabilities to assign them, I have not tried this yet.

According to one reference, the above changes only activate at reboot. However, I have found that if you restart MMCSS and then Audiosrv, the same results obtain.

Addendum. Have just recently looked into Windows 10 in this. It appears to be a driver, not a service, in 10. Will be investigating further. Not sure about Audiosrv either.