Rory Becker's questions

I have been investigating the various products that Microsoft's Azure has to offer on and off for about a year now.

I have setup a couple of App Services which operate against some SQL databases hosted on their servers.

All seems to work fine.

I am now looking to tidy up a bit and have selected the ResourceGroup which contains everything.

There appear to be some services within this group which I dod not remember creating. I'm not saying I didn't do so whilst experimenting and exploring, but I'm really not sure.

I'd like to get rid of anything which is unnecessary, but I'm having difficulty determining what is and isn't required.

Obviously I don't want to kill anything which is actively being used.

Here is a list of unfamiliar things which appear to be in my ResourceGroup

• XYZ-Vnet - Virtual Network
• LiveLoadBalancer - Load Balancer
• LiveLoadBalancer - Public IP Address
• NextSpace_OsDisk1YadaYadaYada - Disk
• NextSpace558 - Network Interface
• NextSpace-IP - Public IP Address
• NextSpace-nsg - Network Security Group

What steps can I take to determine the necessity of each of these?

We have a VB6 app calling out to a local SQL2008R2 instance.

We have had complaints about it's performance dropping considerably.

After a lot of experimental research, we have determined at least 1 cause of this speed decrease.

Whilst running on a base Windows 8.1 the system is relatively fine.

A given benchmark takes approx 0.8 seconds.

Then install Microsoft's KB2919355 and the same operation takes 5.0 seconds.

Thats a 6X drop in performance.

Uninstall this same update and the performance returns to previous levels.

My usual google fu has not managed to find anything specific on this topic. this may be because of all the media surrounding the launch of this particular update.

I'm led to believe that this update is mandatory if you're to install windows 8.1 Update 1.

we have some other machines displaying this behaviour but without the ability to remove this update

Has anyone else experienced a similar issue? Does anyone know of a way to solve this perf issue other than to remove the offending update?

FYI we also have this effect on a number of Windows 7 machines. We are currently chasing down the offending update on this stack.

At what point does a domain suit a network better than a workgroup?

Is there a threshold below which a domain is simply too much work for benefits gained?

Is there a point after which a workgroup is too hard to manage and a domain is more practical?

What criteria do you use to make this decision?

I have a small (windows) network with a few people on it.

We have internet access via a BT router

Generally things are all fine, but occasionally, we seem to experience a dramatic loss of bandwidth.

I could be suffering from a zombie PC or a user running torrent software... Or I could simply have some kind of restriction being placed on my by my ISP?

I want to find out what is going on.

Is there a simple tool which I can run to give me a real world (Which Apps on Which PCs) are using all the bandwidth at any given point?