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  • 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…

  • Windows 11 is now available to Insiders

    As expected, the first public Windows 11 build was released this morning to Insiders. You can read more about it in the official announcement. Significant changes from the leaked build include the new Store app as well as the updated Settings app. For those of you signed up for the Insider Dev channel, check for…

  • New utilities in Windows 11

    There are some new utilities in the leaked Windows 11 Insider build (21996). The first one is diskusage.exe, a (much) fancier version of the DU utility that has been available as a SysInternals tool. It also had showed up previously in Windows 10 Insider builds, but it doesn’t appear to actually be included in the…

  • Cool new Windows 11 deployment info

    It wasn’t just the new ADK that was published today. You can also find a bunch of new information on the What’s new in Windows 11 page. This will take some time to fully digest, so here’s the “digest” version with my comments. Let’s start with the major items: There’s a new “Factory OS” available.…

  • ADK for Windows 11 is available

    As mentioned on Twitter, the Microsoft documentation page for the ADK has been updated with a link to the Windows 11 version of the Assessment and Deployment Kit (ADK) and Windows PE downloads. As you can see, this is build 10.1.22000.1: The 22000 build number matches the expected RTM build number for Windows 11 (a…

  • Windows as a Service cheat sheet, Windows 11 edition

    Sometimes things change more quickly than you expect, and that’s certainly true with the announcements around Windows 11. You can read my summary here. The biggest surprise for me was the hardware requirement changes, which then effectively necessitates another surprise, that there will be three Windows releases this year: Windows 10 21H2 as a new…

  • Windows 11 announcement summary

    For those that managed to get through the live stream, there was at least one big surprise, but it’s the separate blog posts that provided more information. Here’s a summary, with links to where you can learn more: Windows 11 will be a free upgrade from Windows 10. “The free upgrade will begin to roll…

  • Windows Autopilot + Windows 11

    Unless you’re living under a rock (in which case, you wouldn’t be reading this either), I’m sure you’ve seen that there was a leaked build of Windows 11 last week. But you might not have noticed the Twitter posts from people who posted screen shots of the new Windows Autopilot UI in OOBE. I finally…

  • Windows 11: More new SKUs?

    There are more rumors flying around about new Windows 11 SKUs (editions), including one called Windows 11 SE. But interestingly that wasn’t in the Windows 11 ISO that leaked. It just had the standard consumer editions that we are used to. But if you asked Windows 11 Pro what it could be upgraded to, you…

  • More on Windows 11 widgets

    It seems like only it was only a short time ago when the News and Interests feature was delivered through a monthly quality update to all Windows 10 devices. If you didn’t like it, you could turn it off via a policy. Now with the leaked version of Windows 11, that News and Interests feature…

  • Windows 11 Start menu observations

    I initially installed the leaked Windows 11 build to see the changes for myself, as I mentioned in my previous post. After the installation, those changes were fairly obvious: But if you notice, there are some blank “slots” for pinned icons in that list (with the dots on the side of the screen indicating that…

  • Digging into Windows 11

    If you missed the flurry of articles posted today, there was a leak of an ISO containing a fairly recent build (from May 30th) of Windows 11, build 21996. It’s a production-signed build, not a flight-signed build, so it’s close (enough) to a released version. And if you wanted to download it from sketchy websites…