Although the Event Viewer UI in Windows Server 2003 lets you set the maximum size of an event log as 4 GB, in actual fact you should generally never exceed 300 MB for this setting. There are several reasons for this recommendation. First, Event Viewer wasn't designed to scale well for very large event log sizes. And second, setting the maximum size too large could lead to missing events or even corruption of the event log. For more information on configuring maximum event log size, see http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsServer/en/library/5a86ab0f-c7eb-45ed-9e5e-514173bf15e31033.mspx?mfr=true.

***

Mitch Tulloch is lead author for the Windows Vista Resource Kit from Microsoft Press, which is THE book for IT pros who want to deploy, maintain and support Windows Vista in mid- and large-sized network environments. Mitch is also the author of Introducing Windows Server 2008, the first book from Microsoft Press about the exciting new server platform. For more information on these and other books written by Mitch, see www.mtit.com.