Out of Office Hours

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…

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…

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…

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…

My previous blog post raised more questions in my mind than it answered. While Microsoft talks about x64 support being added to Windows 10 Insider builds, it doesn’t say how. And the view of powershell.exe in Task Manager was particularly interesting: So Task Manager shows it as an ARM64 process, but x64 compatible? What does…

First, let’s talk about the device. I’ve written about Windows on ARM64-based devices previously, and used a variety of ARM64-based devices from Microsoft and other OEMs that I borrowed for specific testing, validation, etc. But I never actually owned one. So when I saw the opportunity to buy one cheaply on eBay from the Microsoft…

As announced back in January, the Windows Insider builds have a new “News & Interests” item that shows the current weather on the task bar, and if you click that, it shows news and interests: Don’t ask me why the weather location isn’t in English, or how it picks what it displays (which is very…

One more item that you might want to hide is the new “Meet now” button present in the latest Windows 10 release (20H2), and apparently also added to older Windows 10 releases via October and later cumulative updates. As described in the first KB that added it: Introducing Meet Now in the Windows 10 Taskbar…

It seems like every time Microsoft adds something that shows up the first time you sign into Windows on a newly-deployed clean OS, you then have to search around for “how do I turn that off.” The new Edge (Chromium-based) is no different (now that it’s preinstalled in the latest Windows 10 release). The first-run…