NTDS is the main source of information on Active Directory traffic to and from Domain Controllers. It contains a ton of interesting looking counters.
Unfortunately, there is not much written that documents AD performance issues and how to use these counters. This TechNet overview article is a good place to start. There are two main objects [...]

There are a number of reasons why Performance Sentry may not be collecting some performance Counter or Counters that you need to look at. Sometimes the reason is fairly trivial and easy to rectify. Sometimes the reason is more difficult to determine. Sometimes, it is a problem with the Performance Sentry collection service itself, which we want you [...]

Yes. Microsoft Corp. defines a server “cluster” as a group of independent servers managed as a single system for higher availability, easier manageability and greater scalability. The minimum requirements for a server cluster, according to Microsoft, are (a) two servers connected by a network, (b) a method for each server to access the other’s disk [...]

Installation is a three-step process:
1. Prepare the machine you want to use to administer Performance Sentry.
Run the Setup program contained on the installation disk to install the Sentry Administration program on the Windows workstation or server you intend to use to administer Performance Sentry. Sentry Administration is used to define and activate performance Data Collection [...]

Easy as pie.
The standard installation package that we ship contains three separate Setup routines that can be run separately or together. One setup routine is used to install the Sentry Administration GUI which is used to administer NTSMF data collection. You can install as many copies of the Sentry Administration program as necessary to administer [...]

The short answer is that Intel knows what these things means, but does not publish a mapping anywhere of how these internal names correspond to external products. The closest Intel comes is this document at http://www.intel.com/design/chipsets/mature/mature.pdf, which does not mention either Family or Stepping names.
In semiconductor fabrication, “stepping” refers to the chip manufacturing process which [...]

For back-of-the-envelop capacity planning, it is nice to have a relative speed rating for various processors. You would like to be able to say with confidence that a given processor-bound workload running on machine A running at 400 MHz will execute in 1/3 the time on processor B running at 1.2 GHz that is 3 [...]