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  • 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…

  • Customize the Windows 11 Start menu

    In the original Windows 11 preview builds, the documentation published at the time only covered the OEM process for customizing the Start menu. The type of customization OEMs can do is fairly limited, just adding a few items. Now that Windows 11 has been released, new documentation has been published showing how organizations can make…

  • How many types of Windows updates are there?

    One of the biggest changes in Windows 10 was the move to cumulative updates. With this change, a lot of the nightmares that IT pros had with Windows XP disappeared. But even with the original Windows 10 releases, there wasn’t just a single cumulative update, and since then it seems the update types continue to…

  • Add a TPM to a VMware Fusion VM

    As I noted in a previous blog post, Windows will now enforce the TPM 2.0 requirement for virtual machines with the latest Insider builds. Fortunately, VMware has documented how to do this with an existing VMWare Fusion 12 virtual machine. First, you need to shut down your existing Windows VM (which may already be running…

  • Windows 11: Some answers, some questions

    Windows 11 is now officially available, as expected. (While it’s not yet October 5th in all of the world, it was made available when it became the 5th somewhere in the world.) Since it was initially announced, we’ve heard answers to many of the questions that it generated, but there are still some to be…

  • Windows 11 hardware requirements change again

    I walked through all of the Windows 11 hardware requirements in my previous post, and I thought that was the last we’d have to look at that for a while. But I was wrong — there’s been another change. At least it’s not for this Windows 11 release, but it will likely be in next…

  • Windows 11 new hardware requirements: Justified or not?

    With the announcements of Windows 11, Microsoft disclosed new hardware requirements for Windows 11, which has easily become the most controversial and confusing part of the announcement. Even with subsequent clarifications, the controversy (and still some confusion) remains. As noted in those clarifications, these requirements are designed to align with three principles: Security. The hardware…

  • Windows Server 2022: First impressions

    Updated inline to reflect recent updates, marked [2021-08-31]. Quick summary: Make sure you install KB5005104 or a more recent cumulative update to address a significant list of issues. One more update, marked [2021-09-03]. Some of you might remember when I set up my Hyper-V server, a Lenovo ThinkStation P620 workstation that uses an AMD Threadripper…

  • Install Windows Server 2022 from a USB key

    I hope all of you are using UEFI-based systems by this point. (For those still using BIOS emulation, it’s time to let it go.) So you probably already know that you need to use a FAT32-formatted USB key to install the OS on a PC. But the Windows Server 2022 INSTALL.WIM file is 4.8GB, and…

  • Make Windows images smaller, easily

    Back in March, I posted about the actual size of Windows 10 images over time, which resulted in the table below. Windows 10 release WIM size Windows 10 Enterprise 1511 3.75GB Windows 10 Enterprise 1607 4.20GB Windows 10 Enterprise 1703 4.15GB Windows 10 1709 multi-edition 3.71GB Windows 10 1803 business editions (VL) 4.17GB Windows 10…

  • Windows 365 pricing: scorecard

    In my previous post, I estimated/guessed the price of the various Windows 365 configurations available from Microsoft for cloud PCs. As of August 2nd, the real prices are now available. So how did I do? Let’s compare the Windows 365 Enterprise prices: Microsoft Microsoft price (est.) Microsoft Price (actual) Difference 1 vCPU, 2GB RAM, 64GB…

  • Windows 365 pricing: My predictions

    After my previous post talking about the new Windows 365 service, a number of people pointed out that the Amazon WorkSpaces offering was very similar. True, and from the Microsoft perspective, this has been the #1 competitor product that they have been targeting. (Sure, there are a bunch of additional offerings from smaller vendors, running…

  • Windows 365 / Cloud PC first takes

    With the recent announcement of the Windows 365 service for delivering “Cloud PCs” to users in enterprise and SMBs, I can put on my analyst hat and spend a little time trying to figure out who is likely to use this service. Is it cheaper than just buying a real PC? Let’s start off with…

  • You too can build a Windows 7 image…

    …but why would you want to? I needed to do some testing on Windows 7 and needed an image of it with PowerShell 5.1 included. (PowerShell 2.0 is pretty ancient and lacks many features — it will drive you nuts if you’ve been working with PowerShell 5.1 for any period of time.) That doesn’t sound…

  • Using the Windows 11 ADK with MDT

    While the official notes for the Windows 11 version of the ADK say that it should be used for Windows 11 and Windows Server 2022, without any mention of “can it be used with older OSes,” the expectation is that yes, it should work fine for any other version too. So I attempted to prove…