If you’ve ever installed the Samsung Magician software to check to see if your Samsung SSD’s need firmware updates, you might have seen an annoying behavior: You might have an older version, […]
Samsung Magician won’t launch? Here’s a simple fix
Michael Niehaus
Troubleshooting UEFI boot entries: how #5 is 4th
Some days things just go in a different direction than you expect. In today’s troubleshooting exercise, I had to figure out why a PC wasn’t booting as expected to a new UEFI […]
MacOS Ventura: Where have I heard this before…
Apple released a new version of MacOS called Ventura (version 13), and it has generated some heated discussions around a topic that sounds very familiar: The replacement of the venerable System Preferences […]
Is 2023 the year for Windows on ARM64?
Windows on ARM goes back over a decade. Fortunately, it’s gone from a relatively-crippled device that only ran store apps (Windows RT) to a much more general-purpose device. But is it ready […]
Is 2023 the year for Windows 11?
I’ve stated in various forums that Windows 11 will be successful, whether you like it or not — eventually. That’s because the cost/benefit analysis shifts greatly as Windows 10 gets closer to […]
Windows 11 had a bad year: More links
I read lots of tech-related media (on top of lots of tech-related podcasts); it’s probably a holdover from my Windows marketing and product management days when it was important to stay on […]
Windows 11 had a bad year
Windows 11 was originally released in October 2021, and a second new release (22H2) came out in December 2022. Overall, how is it doing? From all signals, it appears to be doing […]
Want to see end of life dates for, well, anything?
The Windows 10 and Windows 11 release information pages are useful, and there’s also the Microsoft Lifecycle site (not quite as useful as you have to decipher it), but what if you […]
Now released: VMware Fusion for running Windows on ARM on M1/M2 Macs
After a long technical preview period, the released product is finally available. The official announcement can be found here. The previews were fairly rough — functional, but certainly with some rough edges. […]
The mysterious case of broken time sync
Today was kind of weird — after having a brief conversation about time sync during OOBE that brought back a bunch of memories, touching on a blog that I did talking about […]
Project Volterra: my new ARM64 “toy”
Yes, I am a fan of Windows running on ARM64 hardware. I have a few existing ARM64-based devices, including a super-underpowered one, a surprisingly powerful M1-based Mac Mini that runs Windows ARM64 […]
Get ready (and get MDT ready) to deploy Windows 11 22H2
While many are still sticking with Windows 10, those that have already made the leap to Windows 11 or plan to start investing heavily in devices with 12th generation Intel processors will […]
Windows 22H2’s are here
While Windows 11 22H2 gets most of the attention, there is also a new Windows 10 22H2 release. So which one will you deploy, and how will you deploy it? The quick […]
Prompt for time zone (and maybe other stuff) during Autopilot
In one of my sessions this week at the Workplace Ninja Summit, I included a video that showed how you could modify the OOBE flow to prompt for the time zone that […]
Want your own Windows 11 21H2 ARM64 ISOs?
I was trying out Parallels Desktop 18’s new feature that allows it to automatically download Windows 11 for ARM64 to install a new VM, and wondered how exactly that worked. Fortunately, it […]
Getting rid of Teams (consumer), revisited
My previous post on removing the consumer version of Teams from Windows 11 (to avoid confusion when you’re going to install the business version of Teams) had some holes. Rather than edit […]
Send MDM commands without an MDM service using PowerShell
Sometimes you run into something completely by accident; other times, it’s more of a building process based on work that you’ve done in the past. In this case, it’s a combination of […]
How many ways are there to manage Autopilot devices and profiles?
Working on presentations frequently makes me revisit past stuff. And in this case, that “past stuff” predates my involvement with Windows Autopilot (I started working on it in 2018). Let’s go back […]
M1 Mac virtualization revisited: Parallels Desktop 18 vs. VMware Fusion 22H2 Preview
I probably own more ARM64-based machines than then typical person, and I used those somewhat regularly for testing OS deployment scenarios. Virtual machines are usually more productive for those types of activities, […]
Fun with TPM firmware version numbers
I’ve spent a lot of time looking at Autopilot log files, hardware hashes, and TPM-related “stuff.” And it’s always puzzled me why things have to be so difficult. In this case, it’s […]
Out of Office Hours 
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