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  • 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…

  • Will there be a Windows 11?

    That’s been the rumor circulating for the past few weeks, and it’s looking like the Windows event on June 24th will answer all the questions. Since I left Microsoft before conversations about this release happened, I can play the role of uninformed industry pundit and offer my expectations on what we’ll see on the 24th.…

  • New ADK for Windows Server 2022 released

    You can find the new download via the links on this page. Apart from supporting Windows Server 2022 (and only Windows Server 2022, as the page mentions), and fixing the .NET Framework optional feature (as I mentioned yesterday), the release notes also mention that it includes new versions of the Windows Performance Recorder and Analyzer…

  • Windows PE: Why so big? Make it smaller.

    I was working on some Windows PE images the other day and noticed something odd: The size of those images really didn’t make sense. I started off with just a few simple optional components to support scripting (scripting, wmi, securestartup), and ended up with sizes that I’m fairly used to: Platform Scripting size x86 211MB…

  • What are Windows 10 Virtual SKUs?

    This should really be “SKUs, Glorious (Windows) SKUs, part 3” after the previous part 1 and part 2 posts, but for whatever reason multi-part posts don’t get as many views. The joys of being able to see statistics, and the weirdness of blog readers. But on to the real topic: Virtual SKUs. As the previous…

  • SKUs, Glorious (Windows) SKUs: part 2

    First things first: As expected, the SKU vs. Edition distinction that I called out in part 1 was somewhat contentious with some people. I used the terms somewhat interchangeably through the article. The “most correct” term would be “edition” but “SKU” is well understood (and not just by Microsoft people). Even Microsoft documentation is inconsistent…

  • SKUs, Glorious (Windows) SKUs: part 1

    Those who have used Windows for many years have seen different editions, also known as SKUs (a carry-over from the days of physical packaged products where “stock keeping units” were IDs assigned to packages), come and go. Weirdly, as I’ve been present in a number of meetings discussing Windows SKU plans, a thought entered my…

  • Replacing the hard drive in a Tivo

    It’s a little off topic, but it ties in some of the Secure Boot topics that I had discussed previously, and might be useful to anyone trying such a maneuver in the future. I’ve been using Tivo DVRs for many years, and this is the fourth drive replacement that I’ve done. Sadly, it’s only one…

  • Turn off News & Interests page via policy

    Back in February when I wrote my previous blog on this topic, you could turn off News & Interests via a per-user registry edit. At that point, it was just in an Insider build, but it’s now coming soon — and not just in the “next” Windows 10 release but to existing ones as well…

  • Creating the smallest Windows 10 image

    In my previous post, I talked about the size of Windows 10. (And yes, it’s slowly getting bigger.) But if you wanted to make a smaller image, how much smaller is even possible? Let’s see if we can find out. As I mentioned, the size of Windows 10 Enterprise exported from the Windows 10 20H2…

  • Defender definition updates fail from Windows Update on Windows 10 20H2?

    I have been building Windows 10 images based on the Windows 10 20H2 media and seeing repeated failures on the “Security Intelligence Update for Microsoft Defender Antivirus – KB2267602” installation. When doing this as part of an MDT image creation task sequence, that failure ends up happening over and over again, as MDT detects the…

  • Automating Disk Cleanup on Windows 10

    I’ve seen a variety of blogs over the years that talk about how to do this, but I never took the time to actually try it myself. No time like the present. It turns out that the process is fairly simple: Set registry values to say what you want to clean up and then launch…

  • MDT image capture fails when there are pending file renames

    A bug in MDT? Yes, and it looks like it’s been there for a while (going back to Windows 8 at least). Here’s the basic scenario: Use a standard client task sequence to install Windows 10. In my case, I used Windows 10 20H2, and made absolutely no task sequence customizations — just recapturing the…

  • Is Windows 10 “Taking longer than expected”?

    It seems like I run into this screen way too often: While there can be a number of causes for this (in my case, it’s usually because there’s a script that popped up a dialog that you can’t see because it’s hiding behind that screen — pretty hard to click OK when you can’t get…

  • How big is Windows 10?

    Over the years, there have been plenty of discussions about the size of Windows images. Over time, there were a variety of efforts to try to squeeze the OS so that it could fit on smaller (e.g. 16GB) drives, but those never really worked out very well because the OS would typically start off at…

  • “Automatically” activate your Windows Server VMs on Hyper-V

    If you have a Hyper-V host running Windows Server Datacenter edition (in lab environments, typically this would come from a Visual Studio/MSDN subscription), one of the nice features that you can leverage is Automatic Virtual Machine Activation. The problem is that it’s not automatic. When you create a new Windows Server VM, you’ll see that…

  • Windows as a Service cheat sheet

    It’s been three years since I worked in Windows marketing talking about Windows as a Service. At the time, I was quite happy to say that I would never have to talk about WaaS again. Well, you can never really escape that conversation, you can just do your best to avoid it. Now, I don’t…