Out of Office Hours

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  • Need to use media with Hyper-V VMs?

    One of the features that we have in DeployR is the ability to create full stand-alone USB media. But I do my testing on Hyper-V VMs, and that makes things a bit more difficult when the process will only show you USB drives attached locally. So what’s the best way to do that? A good…

  • Chocolatey terms are, umm, interesting

    I’ve been looking at a variety of solutions for installing apps on Windows as we work on expanding what DeployR can do. We’re generally open to all, so of course Chocolatey was on that list. But I noticed a different ISV announced that they were dropping Chocolatey support, so I had to investigate what was…

  • Copilot+ PCs suck, but they don’t, but that’s irrelevant, and the battle is elsewhere. It’s complicated.

    I’ve spent a fair amount of time working with Copilot+ PCs (ignoring the Copilot PCs that came before them, with an over-hyped Copilot keyboard button), both the ARM64 flavors and the x64 equivalents that came later. While they offer some nice features, the overall experience is underwhelming — not because they are bad PCs, no,…

  • JetKVM + TESmart KVM = remote connectivity to a stack of PCs

    I think my “lab” (all the PCs on and around my desk) keeps getting more and more complicated, while at the same time enabling fun scenarios. This time, it’s via a new JetKVM added to my network. That would be easy if I just wanted to access one PC remotely; it gets a little more…

  • A journey with Windows Server 2025 storage

    I’ve been doing a lot of scale testing of DeployR over the past couple of months (because building a fast and reliable content download process, especially under significant load, is hard work). That gave me the opportunity to try out some new things in Windows Server 2025. NVMe First, I switched to the new NVMe…

  • Monthly update traffic: A good reason to update your Windows 11 image monthly

    Out of curiosity, I measured the amount of network traffic generated by Windows Update during a bare metal installation of the OS when there are no updates to install: I was using the 25H2 July WIM file from Microsoft and updating it as part of the DeployR bare metal installation process, so the only expected…

  • Still using WSUS? Patch Tuesday broke it…

    These AI-inspired large Patch Tuesday updates are causing issues. Having cumulative updates suddenly picking up hundreds of individual fixes per month finally seems to have pushed WSUS over the edge: While most people noticed this after the July cumulative update, we actually noticed this earlier while working on DeployR, which has the ability to install…

  • How can Windows 11 keep getting bigger?

    As I do a lot of bare metal deployments, I routinely download the latest Windows 11 ISO from https://my.visualstudio.com (subscription required, you can also get them from https://admin.microsoft.com with other subscriptions). And it never fails, they keep getting bigger. Look at the five that I have on hand: All of these are “Hudson Valley” releases,…

  • Windows 11 26H2 will be an enablement package

    Microsoft confirmed it today: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/windows-itpro-blog/get-ready-for-windows-11-version-26h2/4529367 Windows 11 26H2, like Windows 25H2, will be an enablement package, so no full “OS swap” feature upgrade will be needed. Given past announcements around Windows 11 26H1, released to support new ARM64 hardware, that mentioned that 26H1 cannot be upgraded to 26H2, that was really “foretold” earlier this year,…

  • Time to move to Entra Cloud Sync

    I’ve been using Entra Connect Sync, formerly AAD Connect, for a long time (going back to the days when ADFS was considered “the best way” — but it was also the most complex to implement and I had no real desire to do that). But with recent improvements to the Hybrid Azure AD Join process…

  • To sysprep or not to sysprep, why are we still having this conversation?

    Going way back into the time machine, there were third-party utilities like GhostWalker (remember Ghost?) and NewSID (from Sysinternals) that could “prepare Windows for imaging.” Eventually, Microsoft said “you must use Sysprep, as that’s the only supported way to prepare an OS for duplication.” That should be the end of the story right? Not quite.…

  • Windows Installer: Almost a trick question…

    You’ve all probably seen a dialog like this when using a Windows Installer MSI to upgrade an existing product: OK, files are in use. And you’ve probably also seen messages where Windows Installer then says that it was unable to close the applications. But what do you think would happen if you saw this dialog,…

  • Delivery Optimization downloads are changing, is your MCC ready?

    Microsoft announced late last year that the standalone version of Microsoft Connected Cache for Enterprise is now generally available (so no longer just in preview), with one new feature added: support for HTTPS content. Before we dig more into that, let me explain what “MCC for Enterprise” is. This is the new standalone version of…

  • Windows releases: secret decoder ring required

    It started off as a simple exercise: I want to grab the latest Insider build containing the features likely to be included in Windows 11 26H2 later this year. Which channel and build would that be? The answer, as illogical as it sounds, is “yes.” In true Hitchhiker’s Guide-style, you might then ask “well then,…

  • Discovering PowerShell provider dynamic parameters

    PowerShell ships with providers that expose things like file systems, the registry, certificates, environment variables, etc. To see which are available in your PowerShell session, you can use Get-PSProvider: Not surprisingly, these behave differently based on the type of data or objects they are working with. So Microsoft provided a way to extend the provider’s…

  • Looking for an MDT replacement? Consider DeployR.

    Since Microsoft unceremoniously announced the “immediate retirement” of the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (something that isn’t surprising since it really hasn’t been updated in any significant way since 2013 and leverages obsolete technologies such as VBScript and MSHTA), some of you are probably looking for a replacement. As many of you are probably aware, I’ve been…

  • Following up on the MDT security issue

    I mentioned in passing in a previous blog post that the “immediate retirement” of MDT was caused by Microsoft not wanting to fix a security vulnerability identified by security researchers in the MDT monitoring service. If you aren’t using the monitoring service, you’re OK (as long as you follow some general best practices described below).…

  • A complete history of MDT (abridged)

    Way back in 2008, I published a blog post (now captured by the Wayback Machine) that gave a concise history of BDD, now known as MDT. Eighteen years later, I can now complete that story and expand on some of the items in more detail. (I will refrain from getting too carried away, hence the…

  • Still running ConfigMgr tech preview? Not for long…

    Way back in December 2024, Microsoft released the ConfigMgr Tech Preview 2411 release. It wasn’t long after that before the India-based team maintaining ConfigMgr was either laid off or reassigned to other things, so not surprisingly there was then an announcement in November 2025 that laid out a new annual release cycle for ConfigMgr. Reading…

  • The MDT download is gone, so RIP

    We knew the day would come, and have talked about it for a while (see my previous post). In the march toward oblivion, Microsoft appears to have taken the last step now: the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit installer MSI files are no longer available on the Microsoft download center. Assuming that wasn’t an accident, that’s the…