My previous post was to figure out the format of an Autopilot (OAv3) hash. But there’s more to that intellectual exercise than the exercise itself, because I wanted to be able to […]
Connect the dots: Create your own hashes
Connect the dots: Reverse-engineering an Autopilot hash
I previously posted details on breaking down an Autopilot hash (really, an OAv3 hash as these aren’t Autopilot-specific), leveraging the OA3TOOL.EXE utility in the ADK to convert the hash into a printable […]
Connect the dots: Remediating the Autopilot hardware hash
It’s a common problem: You send a PC off for repair and it comes back with a different hardware component and is no longer recognized as an Autopilot-registered device. In an attempt […]
Connect the dots: From hardware hash to Autopilot profile
In my previous blog post about the hardware hash used with Windows Autopilot, as well as in the official documentation, it mentions that the exact algorithm for identifying a machine isn’t documented. […]
Bypassing Windows 11 hardware requirements, revisited
As I stated previously, bypassing the Windows 11 hardware requirements can be done, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. And I stand by that. But based on a couple of […]
Rufus isn’t magic: How it modifies Windows 11 media
I keep seeing messages on social media about using Rufus to work around various things in the Windows 11 installation process that people don’t like. But no one ever actually explains what […]
Geeking out with the UEFI boot manager
It seems like every time I need to work with UEFI, it turns into a multi-day affair involving reading spec documents and source code examples. And this time is no exception. The […]
Breaking down the Windows Autopilot hardware hash
Lots of you have gone through the effort of gathering the Windows Autopilot hardware hash from a computer (with around 17 million downloads of the Get-WindowsAutopilotInfo script on the PowerShell Gallery), with […]
Requiring a network connection during OOBE
When deploying an organization-owned device, you typically want to put “guard rails” in place to make sure the user goes down the right path. (Really, that’s what Windows Autopilot is all about, […]
Product Review: Apcsilmic DOT 1 Mini PC
I’ll state this up front: I’m a fan of ARM64-based PCs. They may not always be the best choice for everyone, but there are always scenarios where they make sense (whether running […]
Language pack handling in Windows 11 continues to evolve
The later Windows 10 releases were shifting to using Language Experience Packs (LXPs), which had a variety of limitations. So it wasn’t terribly surprising when Windows 11 shifted back to focusing on […]
Customizing the Windows 11 22H2 Start menu layout
When Windows 11 shipped, the Start menu wasn’t particularly flexible. One of the biggest losses was the ability to group apps into folders. With the release of Windows 11 Insider build 22557, […]
Getting rid of Widgets in Windows 11
It’s becoming a theme: things get added to Windows, IT pros want to know how to remove them. Maybe it would be better to not include them in the first place and […]
Getting rid of Teams (consumer)
I’ve seen all the grumbling about the consumer Teams app (the one with the white “T” icon) being a bit of a pain to remove, which I didn’t understand — it’s just […]
How big are the built-in Windows 11 apps?
It seems like a simple enough question. For all of the apps that are built into Windows 10 and Windows 11, just how much disk space are they taking up? That question […]
Microsoft will let you run Windows 11 on an M1 Mac, but they won’t support it
In a previous blog post, I talked about two products that enabled running the ARM64 version of Windows 11 on M1-based Macs, Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion. Both work reasonably well, but […]
Geeking out: Offline domain join
Way back in 2009, with the release of Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7, a new feature was added called “offline domain join” (ODJ for short). Initially, the feature wasn’t understood […]
Do you properly wipe your disks (maybe following US government standards)?
This is one of those topics that I’ve been in the middle of for years. “Can you tell me how to properly wipe a disk before we dispose of or return this […]
Want to refresh a Windows 11 device? Don’t use USMT.
It’s a process I’ve done hundreds of times: wipe-and-load an existing device with a new Windows OS image, using USMT to capture documents and settings, migrating them forward to the new clean […]
Bare metal provisioning: Boot options
When we were first looking at implementing bare metal provisioning as part of what became the Tanium Provision module, we were already into the Covid-19 pandemic work-from-home mindset. So, we expanded our […]
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