BlackBelt - Advanced Troubleshooting the Windows OS

Participants get full access to labs and are able to view the course as a recording for one month after the course.

Have you ever wondered if Windows Pagefile settings should be changed or how they actually work? Have you ever wondered what the values in Task Manager actually mean – like Paged Pool, Working Set, Free memory, etc? Do you know how a file actually gets cached and finally written to the disk or how threads communicate with each other? Have you ever wondered what Mutexes or Semaphores in Process Explorer really mean?

This course will provide you with the answers and more!

Sami Laiho offers two courses for troubleshooting of anything that related or runs on the Windows OS. If you’re thinking about which course to take first, take the other one. If you are totally familiar with the stuff on the other course you are very welcome to join this one as well. It’s just the trainer's professional opinion that the best troubleshooters can be taught by taking these two courses and it’s better to take the more Tools-oriented BlackBelt Troubleshooting course first and then join this Content-oriented Advanced Troubleshooting course next.

This four-day course teaches you how the operating system actually works under the hood. Windows Internals was previously taught globally by two of the best-known teachers David Solomon and Mark Russinovich. David is now retired from training and Mark is working for Microsoft. This training is based on their Windows Internals book which is considered mandatory knowledge for all top Microsoft professionals including Microsoft’s own PFE’s (Premier Field Engineer). That book might be a bit too deep for most so this is an easy way to learn the important parts of the book at an effective pace.

This course teaches you what you see with the tools that are used for troubleshooting. If you’re not that familiar with the tools we recommend you take the BlackBelt Troubleshooting course first – I can assure you want to take both when you get started!

Target audience: This training is meant for all administrators who want to deepen their knowledge about Windows. It is also suitable for people who think they know everything about the Windows OS… It’s a very deep dive course and surely in no way suitable for beginners but seasoned administrators. If someone has gone through the BlackBelt OS Troubleshooting course then this course will deepen that knowledge even further. This course applies to all Windows versions from NT 4 to Windows 10/11, both servers and clients.

Prerequisites to the course (recommended):

• experience with Windows Administration;
• experience with Active Directory;
• experience with networking infrastructure.

After completing this course, students will be able to:

• understand how the Windows OS works under the hood;
• understand how Device Drivers work;
• understand how Processes work;
• understand how Threads work;
• understand how Virtual Memory works;
• understand how Windows uses physical memory.

The training topics:

Day 1

• concepts and tools;
• system architecture;
• system mechanisms.

Day 2

• management mechanisms;
• processes, threads and jobs;
• security.

Day 3

• networking;
• I/O System;
• storage management;
• memory management.

Day 4

• cache manager;
• file systems;
• startup and shutdown;
• crash dump analysis.

Length: 32 academic hours

Continuing Education Curriculum Group: 0612 Database and Network Design and Administration

The training takes place 9:30-16:45 at Vana-Lõuna 39/1, Tallinn. You can park in the Europark parking lot at Veerenni 36, EP63. 

BlackBelt trainer is Sami Laiho.

Sami Laiho is one of the world’s leading professionals in the Windows OS and Security. Sami has been working with and teaching OS troubleshooting, management, and security since 1996.

In 2019 Sami was chosen by TiVi-magazine as one of the top 100 influencers in IT in Finland. He is the 11th most followed person in his field in Finland.

At Ignite 2018, Sami’s “Behind the Scenes: How to build a conference winning session” and “Sami Laiho: 45 Life Hacks of Windows OS in 45 minutes” sessions were ranked as #1 and #2 out of 1708 sessions!! This was the first time in the history of the conference that anyone has been able to do this.
Before that, at Ignite 2017, the world’s biggest Microsoft event, Sami was evaluated as the Best External Speaker! Also, Sami’s sessions were evaluated as the Best session in TechEd North America, Europe and Australia in 2014, and Nordic Infrastructure Conference in 2016, 2017 and 2019.