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 […]
Geeking out with the UEFI boot manager
Michael Niehaus
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 […]
Automatically join devices to Azure AD
It started off as a simple task: Create a provisioning package that can be used to join a device to Azure AD. But when it comes to using the Windows Configuration Designer, […]
M1 Mac virtualization: Parallels Desktop vs. VMware Fusion
I have a Mac Mini with the original ARM-based M1 chip. Not surprisingly, the first thing I wanted to do on it was to run virtual machines. (You might think the first […]
Windows 11 includes new BCD PowerShell cmdlets
When configuring the Windows boot configuration database (BCD), we’ve always had BCDEDIT.EXE, which is a reasonable tool to use but not a lot of fun to automate, e.g. finding and removing a […]
Fixing PowerShell on Windows PE for ARM64
In past blog posts, I noted that the ADK for Windows 10 started adding ARM64 builds of Windows PE, but they were missing some key things: no HTA support, and busted .NET […]
The overhead of Edge on Windows 11 (and 10)
I noticed while looking at the WebView2 processes on Windows 11 that there was also a set of Edge processes running from the moment I logged in: I understand why that happens […]
The overhead of Widgets and Teams in Windows 11
When you sign into an unmodified Windows 11 installation, you may notice the side-by-side icons for the Chat app (basically an entry point for the consumer version of Teams — the one […]
Out of Office Hours 
You must be logged in to post a comment.