It’s something that always annoyed me: Why does the Start menu pop up when you first log in to Windows, both on a new install and on an upgrade? It’s not really […]
New tweak added to Autopilot Branding
Michael Niehaus
Sample app secret decoder ring
I’ve published a bunch of sample Win32 apps for Intune and Autopilot, most of which are just PowerShell scripts bundled into an .intunewin file. For the first few, I posted the step-by-step […]
Updating in-box apps with PowerShell
It’s always the simple things that turn out to be more complicated than expected. I was deploying new machines with Windows 11 and needed to automate the process of adding PowerShell 7.4 […]
Move to Windows 11 or write a big check
There are lots of IT admins with lots of different reasons why they don’t like or don’t want to move to Windows 11. But we’re at the point where none of that […]
We need entertainment during ESP…
We’ve all sat and watched the Enrollment Status Page (ESP) during an Autopilot provisioning process — it’s pretty boring overall, showing information that isn’t really useful (e.g. what does “Preparing for mobile […]
Prompt for information during Autopilot with an app
Back in 2022, I did a post about using the MDM terms of use page (which is almost never actually used since Azure AD now has a better solution as part of […]
ESP + app failures: Did Microsoft fix something?
I’ve been used to the routine: If an app fails to install during Autopilot with ESP monitoring the progress, you don’t find out about it right away. Instead, you would have to […]
Entertaining bug of the day: Autopilot + Task Sequence
If you are doing user-driven Windows Autopilot provisioning in combination with a ConfigMgr task sequence initiated via “Co-management settings” in Intune, you know that the task sequence is tracked as an application […]
When does a Windows client sync with Intune?
It seems like a simple question, but a complete answer isn’t necessarily simple. We can start off with the documentation: OK, so about every 8 hours. But it’s different right after you […]
Using a well-known Intune app ID for access to Graph? Not for much longer.
I noticed a section on the Features in development page that talks about a change coming on April 1st, which is not very far away (and an interesting place to put “we’re […]
Autopilot topics of the week
It’s been a week of randomness, but at least some of that randomness is interesting. Let’s look at a few goings-on in the world of Windows Autopilot. Yes, you can generate hashes […]
What’s actually in a WIM or ESD file?
It seemed like a simple question: Can you figure out what’s in an ESD file without download the whole file? I’ve been manipulating data like this quite a bit over the past […]
Convert Windows 11 Home to Education for Autopilot
It’s a question that’s come up a number of times: How can I take a device running Windows 11 Home, upgrade it to Windows 11 Education, and provision it via Windows Autopilot? […]
WindowsApps folder getting out of hand?
The whole Windows app (UWP) model is weird: apps are installed per user, but the files for those apps are shared between users. That leads to situations where there are several different versions […]
New enhancements to Get-AutopilotDiagnosticsCommunity
It started off as a simple change: I was annoyed that the “Observed Timeline” in the output from the Get-AutopilotDiagnosticsCommunity (and the older Get-AutopilotDiagnostics script too) had events in the wrong order. For example, […]
Autopilot branding app improvements
Since I had been testing out the UpdateOS script to see how it performed based on the number of CPU cores, I figured I should try the same thing with the Autopilot […]
Autopilot randomly not working? Perhaps KB5033055 is to blame.
I was doing some testing with Windows Autopilot on Windows 11 23H2 and couldn’t figure out why properly-registered machines with profiles assigned would “sometimes” behave like they weren’t registered with Autopilot. Instead of […]
Installing updates during Autopilot: Windows 11 edition, revisited again
This seems to be a frequent blog topic, with posts going back to 2019: So why bring this up yet again? I blame Gary Block, whose comment on Twitter said that he sees […]
Looking back on 2023: Site statistics
History has proven that posting top 10 lists detailing the most popular articles for the year on https://oofhours.com doesn’t draw many views. But I don’t care, I’m going to do it anyway. (Seriously, I […]
Use the new community modules for Autopilot
As I mentioned in my previous post, there is a new community version of the WindowsAutopilotIntune PowerShell module that I created a few years ago (needed because the “official” Intune modules don’t […]
Out of Office Hours 