Thanks for the sympathy and link, but it wasn't working...

I'd also suggest you go 64bit at this point on your machines. Especially with VMs.

Upgrading memory is easy, as mentioned above.

When you say you restored the server, how did you do that?

Gus, nice post, and thanks for the details of how you use this in an interview.

I'm still not sure you need to kill these processes. Maybe, but you might need lots of them before it would affect your server at all. We used to do...

You ALWAYS want to have free space in your data and log files. Growing them is a relatively expensive process, so you have free space in there.

A 10MB log has...

Ohh, I want video for the podcasts

Wow. that's a new one on me. Thanks for the update.

Interesting, Bob. I might have to get a report.

chkdsk isn't thorough enough. You need low level diagnostics, as well as double checking every software version in the I/O system (drivers, firmware,etc)

Paul,

I agree. Don't bait-and-switch. Let someone know what to expect in the interview.

I'm confused.

If you have nightly loads that make the log large, how is that space wasted? You need it every night. Shrinking during the day is silly. What else do...

Everything you do is a guess here. It's hard to estimate this unless you know the transaction load.

And if you do, then why not just run a log backup every...

The deallocations of pages are logged, not each row, so this is quick.

Also, keep in mind that a truncate is usually to clear out data. I've not seen it included...

I agree with John. This sounds like an issue outside of SQL Server.