You can read all about the original concept here. My good friend and fellow CTP Barry Schiffer also wrote a really good article about the need for a product like ThreadLocker here.

Some history:

In essence, ThreadLocker was a utility for both shared and 1:1 desktop environments. It allowed you to layer in rules for processes that had a history of high or discruptive CPU usage, to protect the other users (in a shared environment) or to protect other running processes and the users interface (explorer.exe) while a large compute job was occurring.

ThreadLocker exploded with popularity and has received well over 100,000 downloads in the last three years. Alike ThinKiosk, ThreadLocker is a tool I regularly come across in my customers environments while consulting and it always suprised me with it’s uptake and popularity. I have observed ThreadLocker in VDI, SBC and even on stand alone workstations with great levels of success.

Moving on:

One of the frustrations I had with ThreadLocker, was any .NET based language (c#, vb.net, etc.) was never quick enough to be able to add an intelligent aspect to the utility without actually making CPU usage worse by implementing. ThreadLocker 1.0 relied on static rules and any new processes would have to be observed and added.

Recently David Coombes and I undertook the side project of redesigning ThreadLocker to run in c++, adding the raw speed we needed to be able to make intelligent decisions based on CPU usage and react in a fraction of a second to a sudden CPU spike. ThreadLocker 2.0 was designed to specifically tackle two issues:

• Processes comsuming a large % of CPU and is multithreaded.
• Many buggy or heavy processes, each consuming a core each.

We didnt want to tackle this with the approach of many others, where they’ll pause and resume threads many times a second creating a “SawTooth” effect on the processes CPU usage. We wanted the processes to run as fast as they need up to a certain threshold and only be restricted when contention is likely.

Having experienced other vendors approaches where process priority is dropped, many times this simply does not cut it as a heavy process, even at idle priority, will cause the other users and processes to feel slow and sluggish.

Why is ThreadLocker different?

With ThreadLocker 2.0, you can elect a percentage of your CPU cores that ThreadLocker can use for isolating these processes. When a process violates the ThreadLocking criteria, they are locked into these subset of cores to contend with any other processes that are also ThreadLocked, leaving well behaved processes to be able to take advantage of all cores in system. Once they start to behave again and do so for a certain amount of time, the processes are dropped back into the “wild” unless they decide to misbehave again.

This approach is extremely fast (ThreadLocker consumes less CPU than Microsoft’s own Task Manager) from a processing point of view and also has the benefit of allowing users to multitask with other applications while, for example, Excel hammers the ThreadLocking cores during a calculation.

The end result has been fantastic. Threadlocker can be installed and up and running in seconds. There is no longer a requirement for static rules and out of box, all aspects of the logic can be tuned to suit your environment, but more than likely wont be needed.

 Demo Video:

Availability

We are proud to announce the general availability of ThreadLocker 2.0 and more information can be found on our website at http://www.thinscaletechnology.com/threadlocker.

Thinkiosk Version 4.0 is the culmination of 9 months hard work, rebuilding ThinKiosk in a new development style to include the enterprise features many of you requested, adding a management server, secure key redirection technologies, local group policy control and a number of other features. After weeks of rigorous testing we’re delighted to announce the availability of ThinKiosk version 4… Today!

With the release of Version 4.0 we’re lifting the cloak on the company we’ve setup in order to support and further develop ThinKiosk, ThinScale Technology. We’ve set up ThinScale as a little software company to publish applications to the virtualisation community, tackling the smaller issues and annoyances we face day to day as consultants and administrators. More clever little products are in the pipeline, but for now enough about the company!

ThinKiosk Versions:

The largest change around ThinKiosk 4.0 is the version introduction. ThinKiosk will ship in two editions, Enterprise edition and Community edition. Remko and I took a look at the product back in October last year and identified area’s that the project needed investment in order to reach and fulfill it’s full potential. We also noted that a number of customers really wanted the support and functionality offered by a professional product. After much deliberation we took the decision at that point to invest the time and resources into the product to ensure it fulfils it’s potential, this in turn justified the need for a chargeable Enterprise product.

ThinKiosk Community Edition.

• The community edition is free and will always remain free, we want to make sure the community will always have the benefit of the product.
• The Community edition is still one of the most powerful Windows alternatives on the market, including paid for products.
• The Community edition is an extremely powerful piece of software with one or two limitations in comparison to the Enterprise product.
• The Community edition will receive functionality from the enterprise edition over time.

We’re extremely proud of the community edition and we do recommend it if you do not require the functionality of the Enterprise Version.

Enterprise Edition.

ThinKiosk Enterprise Edition will include all the current functionality you know and use in ThinKiosk, along with loads of additional features and benefits. The enterprise version of ThinKiosk delivers far more value than the competitor products and from a functionality perspective beats them hands down even in its first release.

An exact side by side comparison can be found along with pricing and details on the ThinScale Licensing page.

Some of the New goodies are listed below!

Central Management:

ThinKiosk 4.0 new central management server. With this central management console, you can:

• Manage off domain machines.
• Push updates.
• Perform remote power commands.
• Remote Control end users.
• Report on your current ThinKiosk hardware.
• and much more.

MagicFilter:

Allow me to introduce our new ‘dynamic key pass-through technology’ MagicFilter. Magic filter will now block local Ctrl + Alt + Del and windows + L keystrokes and “magically” send them on to the remote desktop environment as if the user is working locally. This gives the user an immersive, native feeling desktop experience from the ThinKiosk client.

We are extremely proud to say we are the only Windows Thin Client vendor on the market who can do this.

Integrated Browser:

ThinKiosk 4.0 is a fully fledged browser, so you can allow your users access to web resources without compromising on security. You can layer in as many bookmarks as you like to the browser or you can simply allow the users to browse the sites they wish via the address bar.

And so much more!

I covered a lot of the functionality previews back in April in the feature teaser.

Want to learn more?

Remko and I will be doing a webinar with the good folks over in www.xenappblog.com next week, sign up to hear our story and get some insider information on the product road map!

And without further ado:

I’ve taken enough of your time for now, to jump right in click the download button below and we’ll send you everything you need to get started.

After much head scratching we discovered an extra registry setting embedded in the group policy:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREPoliciesMicrosoftWindows NTTerminal
ServicesWFDontAppendUserNameToProfile dword = 1.

Still none the wiser to the issue we found the following article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/908011. With this we put two and two together, and logged into a 2003 domain controller (sp2) and low and behold the policy setting was available.

It seems the group policy were updated in service pack 2 to reflect an issue when trying to configure mandatory profiles, I do aim to copy the policies to my laptop and see if i can update them to reflect the change but I’ve been to lazy so far

Update: Well i got around to testing the policy copy, if you copy the .adm files from the domain controller to your local machine with the problem, it will resolve the issue.

Heres an example of scripting the change:

pushd domaincontrollerc$windowsinf
copy *.adm %windir%inf
popd

That’s it. reload gpedit.msc and you should see hte entries correctly.