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  • 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 OS. It’s a process that’s worked well since the first time I tried it with Windows XP. So enter Windows 11 and the…

  • 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 definition of “normal” imaging scenarios to include those that weren’t typically done, e.g. imaging from home over the internet (since it will usually…

  • 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, nothing ever seems to be easy. First, the store version (the one that is supposed to be kept most up to date) wouldn’t…

  • M1 Mac virtualization: Parallels Desktop vs. VMware Fusion

    2022-08-17: Feel free to read through this post and then check out the new follow-up post that compares the latest versions of Parallels and VMware Fusion. Also see this post that clarifies Microsoft’s licensing for Windows for ARM64. Oh, and you can generate your own Windows 11 ARM64 ISOs now too, just like Parallels does.…

  • 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 specific item from a script. People have managed to wrap this in a PowerShell script, but parsing the output of executables isn’t much…

  • 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 Framework/PowerShell support. While the HTA support is likely to never be addressed (given that it’s based on Internet Explorer, which is mostly dead),…

  • 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 — it’s a performance optimization, so that when you do actually launch Edge it’s ready to go (at the expense of some extra…

  • 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 with the white T icon) and Widgets. But what is more interesting to me is the overhead of those. Without doing anything, you…

  • Geeking Out: Network booting

    When we started working on Tanium Provision, one of the things we needed to build was a mechanism to do network booting. It’s fine to boot from a USB key (and necessary in some scenarios, something to discuss later), but powering on a machine and pressing a couple of keys is much easier. So, we…

  • Windows 11: When 4GB is not 4GB

    Funny story: I was trying to test out some Windows 11 upgrade scenarios and had configured a VM with 4GB of RAM since that’s the minimum required to support Windows 11. With that configuration, Microsoft’s Hardware Compatibility script (or a Tanium equivalent of that added as a sensor, which I showed in today’s Go-Tanium Endpoint…

  • Upgrading to Windows 11 with Tanium

    I’ve always known that Tanium supported doing in-place upgrades to later versions of Windows, but since I had been focused primarily on Tanium provision for bare metal imaging, I had never actually gone through full process myself. Since I’m going to be talking about it on https://twitch.tv/GoTanium tomorrow (Tuesday, January 25th, exact time TBD —…

  • Introducing Tanium Provision

    Most people remember that I left Microsoft and joined Tanium a while back. One of the things I’ve been working on at Tanium was publicly announced this week, with a Go-Tanium YouTube video: You can also find a Tanium Community article that provides an overview of Tanium Provision (the module we created to do bare…

  • You can bypass the Windows 11 hardware requirement check, but it’s not a good idea

    2022-07-25: See https://oofhours.com/2022/07/25/bypassing-windows-11-hardware-requirements-revisited/ for more up to date information. 2021-01-25: Edited to reflect that settings that worked on Insider Preview builds no longer work with the released Windows 11 RTM builds. Microsoft implemented some new hardware requirements for Windows 11, and a future Windows 11 release will likely enforce those same restrictions in virtual machines.…

  • What’s new in Windows 11, part 2

    Part 1 was rather lengthy, covering the UI changes in Windows 11. We’ll start off part 2 by looking at the changes to the Windows apps. Yes, these are also UI changes. In some cases, these changes add functionality, but in many cases it’s just a new coat of paint. Maybe this post won’t be…

  • What’s new in Windows 11, part 1

    I did a presentation at a couple of events in October and November that went through a fairly lengthy list of new features in Windows 11. This builds on the information that I previously posted on Windows 11, but I though it was still useful enough to turn those 56 slides into blog posts. In…

  • How does UEFI boot from a CD?

    In a past post about UEFI, I talked about the boot process: The UEFI firmware looks for a FAT32 disk volume that contains a specific file, e.g. EFI\BOOT\bootx64.efi, and it loads that file; that boot loader takes care of loading the rest of the operating system. And if you want to boot a UEFI device…

  • Yes, Windows as a Subscription

    I’m sure all of you remember when Windows as a Service was introduced with Windows 10. Most people thought this was really “Windows as a Subscription” and that Microsoft was somehow going to charge everyone for the right to continue using Windows. But in reality, that was introduced many years earlier, in the enterprise space…

  • Trying out Proxmox VE, an open-source virtualization platform

    I had a specific need (more on that later) that could be satisfied with solutions such as QEMU (an open-source machine emulator that can do all sorts of interesting things) and KVM (an open-source hypervisor). But using these directly isn’t much fun due to the complexity of the tools, so there are a collection of…

  • Changes to Windows 10 as a service

    With today’s release of Windows 10 21H2 (a fairly boring release overall as there aren’t really any significant new features — thankfully it can easily be deployed to Windows 10 2004 and above as an enablement package), Microsoft announced that there is no longer a “Semi-Annual Channel.” That’s because Windows 10 (like Windows 11) will…

  • Need to manage a diverse set of platforms? Try Tanium.

    I spent a good portion of my career focused on managing and deploying Windows devices. Since most organizations have a lot of these, it made sense for most orgs to have teams dedicated to care and feeding of only these Windows devices. But there’s a lot of additional diversity in organizations today — and generally…