The idea behind the UEFI Secure Boot feature is to ensure that the device will only be able to run trusted code, at least until an operating system is up and running […]
Booting your own Windows PE image
My previous blog talked about how to create a Windows PE boot image. Next you need to know how to boot it. And there are plenty different ways to do that. These […]
Build your own Windows PE image
Windows PE has been around for quite a while. (I’ll avoid getting into the history here, but I may revisit that with a future post.) But the instructions for creating a Windows […]
Product Review: Lenovo ThinkStation P620
I’ve done lots of posts, but never an actual product review. But enough people asked me about the workstation I am using to run virtual machines, so I thought it was a […]
Fun with VMware Fusion network adapters and Windows PE
I’ve been doing some Windows 10 deployments on Mac OS running VMware Fusion (version 11.5.7) and have been struggling with DRIVER_PNP_WATCHDOG blue screens booting Windows PE. After some investigation, I narrowed it […]
Export-WindowsDriver doesn’t work?
I needed a set of VMware drivers for Windows PE. The VMware documentation for doing that is rather ancient (and ineffective), so I went to plan B, extracting the drivers from a […]
Turn off the Azure AD “Stay signed in?” page
After years of clicking “yes” on the dialog: I finally decided it was time to turn it off. While it might be useful in web browsers, it’s generally not useful in the […]
Using PSExec with Windows Terminal
I’ve grown quite attached to using Windows Terminal to run PowerShell, cmd.exe, and various other command-line environments. As it implements a fairly standard console environment and can be customized, it’s pretty easy […]
Quick note: Windows 10 2004/20H2 and renamed Administrator accounts
This one popped up on Twitter today, although it’s been around for about a month: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4592802/error-when-accessing-the-sign-in-options-or-users-mmc-snap-in The quick summary from how I read this: If you’ve renamed the local Administrator or Guest […]
Windows PE startup, revisited
Way back when, I had to decipher the mechanism used in Windows PE to run stuff, i.e. to kick off the MDT/BDD processes. It’s been years since I looked at that, because […]
