Out of Office Hours

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  • Geeking out with UEFI, again

    Last year, I published a blog that got into a fair amount of depth on UEFI that was surprisingly popular, both at the time I posted it and again last month after an open source newsletter included a link to it.  (Someone then copied the entire article and posted it on their site.  Grr.)  But…

  • What’s in a (Windows computer) name?

    The year was 1983.  A new set of APIs called NetBIOS was introduced, used by the IBM PC Network LAN software.  That API established a device naming convention that allowed for 15 character computer names, plus a one-character suffix to differentiate between types of devices.  That API was then later adopted for token ring, IPX/SPX,…

  • Setting up independent environments in Hyper-V

    It seems like I’ve always got a few different environments running in Hyper-V, each with their own DNS, DHCP, Active Directory, etc. running in them.  And in today’s cloud-connected world, they can’t just be isolated environments, they need to have internet access.  To simulate something close to “real-world” environments, I usually set up a server…

  • “Something went wrong” with OOBEAADV10

    Maybe you’ve seen this error before: The explanation is somewhat simple, even if the cause might not be: It means that there was some sort of error while loading the Azure AD authentication page. 99% of the time it’s going to be a network error – the page being displayed is effectively a web page…

  • Need for (disk) speed

    The speed of computers has come a long way since I first started working with them. And while we can all appreciate that CPUs are orders of magnitude faster and that we have lots of RAM to work with, I still find people “saving money” by buying spinning disks. They’re OK if you just want…

  • Network tracing during OOBE with Fiddler

    Sometimes you need to see what’s going on as a device is joining Azure AD and enrolling in an MDM service.  Since that process is typically done during OOBE, that means capturing network traffic during OOBE.  Fortunately, Fiddler (the “legacy” version – haven’t spent enough time with the Fiddler Everywhere release yet to figure out…

  • I’m not dead yet

    I (somewhat) quoted Douglas Adams when I posted that I was leaving Microsoft after 16+ years. And after reading enough comments on that on LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. that sounded more like eulogies, I figured the “new job” post could quote Monty Python. If you aren’t familiar with the reference: “I feel happy.” At the beginning…

  • Tech-related podcasts to follow

    Initially, I started listening to podcasts for a way to relax during the daily commute.  Then that daily commute disappeared (permanently for me, but I suspect many others will eventually return to the rush hours of the past), so I started listening during my daily run.  Of course I started with tech-related podcasts, and over…

  • Windows 10 and a PC’s real-time clock

    I’ve written enough about the challenges of Windows devices and the real-time clock that you’ve probably heard this one before:  Windows stores the time in the real-time clock in the local time zone, which causes problems if you install a new OS on the device and it boots up in a different default time zone…

  • So long, and thanks for the Coke Zero

    It might be a corny take on the Douglas Adams book title and quote, but there is a point to it.  Friday was my last day working for Microsoft.  In these odd Covid-19 days, that mean driving into the office, dropping off my computers, company cards, IDs, etc., sending a picture of it all to…

  • 30 years in the industry, many more to go…

    It occurred to me over the summer that I missed a significant milestone:  As of May 2020, I had been working in IT and technology for 30 years.  That started with my college graduation in May 1990.  Certainly time flies.  In that time, I’ve worked for exactly two companies (Marathon Oil Company and Microsoft).  If…

  • Persistently disabling Shift-F10 in OOBE

    A couple of months ago I did a blog post that talked about how to disable Shift-F10 during OOBE by creating a DisableCmdRequest.tag file in the right location.  I mentioned at the time that the file would be removed if you reset the OS, so you’d have to do some more work if you wanted…

  • Export all your hardware hashes from ConfigMgr

    Quite some time ago, ConfigMgr added an inventory class that gathers the hardware hashes needed to register devices with Windows Autopilot from every Windows 10 device that it is managing.  Those are stored as part of the standard ConfigMgr inventory, in the SMS_G_System_MDM_DEVDETAIL_EXT01 WMI class.  Combine that with the serial number from SMS_G_SYSTEM_PC_BIOS and you…

  • Coming soon: Improvements to app installation error handling in ESP

    For those of you who have been deploying apps (of any type, Win32, LOB/MSI, UWP, etc.) during a Windows Autopilot provisioning process with ESP enabled, you may have noticed that an installation failure for an app has an interesting result:  ESP will time out at the end of the configured timeout period, even if the…

  • Improving the ESP duration

    I talked about the behavior of the Windows MDM stack in a blog post about a year ago.  The quick recap:  When a device first enrolls in Intune, it will initiate an MDM sync (i.e. ask Intune to send a list of new policies, apps, certs, etc. that need to be process) every 3 minutes…

  • Speeding up Windows Autopilot for existing devices

    2020-09-08 quick note:  This blog post was resurrected from an original post on http://blogs.technet.microsoft.com (RIP) from October 25, 2018, posted here with minimal edits. At Ignite 2018, we announced Windows Autopilot for existing devices , a new feature designed to migrate devices from Windows 7 (or any other version of Windows, i.e. 8.1 or 10),…

  • Using Microsoft Graph from Python

    I’ve spent a lot of time using the Microsoft Graph for interacting with Azure Active Directory, Intune, and Windows Autopilot.  Most of this has been done using PowerShell (scripting) or C# (programming).  But as I got questions about using Python from my son (college classes) and others, I decided to spend a little of my…

  • Command line apps from the store: How does that work?

    I had talked about the Windows Package Manager, WINGET.EXE, in a previous blog, but one thing always made me wonder:  How do those actually work?  I mean certainly the app packages contain the actual executables, but those executables aren’t placed in C:\Windows\System32 (that would be a bad practice).  Whether these apps are packaged as an…

  • Time, time, time (and location services)

    I’ve spent a lot of time talking about time, time zones, with multiple blogs (part 1 and part 2) talking about available options.  One of the options that I mentioned in the first blog was to let Windows 10 set the time zone automatically.  But that’s a little tricky, as there are some dependencies: Location…

  • Windows 10 2004 + every local experience pack = A planet-wide OS image

    I talked about the improvements that Windows 10 version 2004 introduced with local experience packs in a previous blog.  In the context of Windows Autopilot and OOBE, you can add one or more local experience packs (LXPs, basically, stripped-down language packs) so that the user can choose between them at the start of OOBE.  Yuri…