It’s becoming a theme: things get added to Windows, IT pros want to know how to remove them. Maybe it would be better to not include them in the first place and […]
Getting rid of Widgets in Windows 11
Michael Niehaus
Getting rid of Teams (consumer)
I’ve seen all the grumbling about the consumer Teams app (the one with the white “T” icon) being a bit of a pain to remove, which I didn’t understand — it’s just […]
How big are the built-in Windows 11 apps?
It seems like a simple enough question. For all of the apps that are built into Windows 10 and Windows 11, just how much disk space are they taking up? That question […]
Microsoft will let you run Windows 11 on an M1 Mac, but they won’t support it
In a previous blog post, I talked about two products that enabled running the ARM64 version of Windows 11 on M1-based Macs, Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion. Both work reasonably well, but […]
Geeking out: Offline domain join
Way back in 2009, with the release of Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7, a new feature was added called “offline domain join” (ODJ for short). Initially, the feature wasn’t understood […]
Do you properly wipe your disks (maybe following US government standards)?
This is one of those topics that I’ve been in the middle of for years. “Can you tell me how to properly wipe a disk before we dispose of or return this […]
Want to refresh a Windows 11 device? Don’t use USMT.
It’s a process I’ve done hundreds of times: wipe-and-load an existing device with a new Windows OS image, using USMT to capture documents and settings, migrating them forward to the new clean […]
Bare metal provisioning: Boot options
When we were first looking at implementing bare metal provisioning as part of what became the Tanium Provision module, we were already into the Covid-19 pandemic work-from-home mindset. So, we expanded our […]
Automatically join devices to Azure AD
It started off as a simple task: Create a provisioning package that can be used to join a device to Azure AD. But when it comes to using the Windows Configuration Designer, […]
M1 Mac virtualization: Parallels Desktop vs. VMware Fusion
2022-08-17: Feel free to read through this post and then check out the new follow-up post that compares the latest versions of Parallels and VMware Fusion. Also see this post that clarifies […]
Windows 11 includes new BCD PowerShell cmdlets
When configuring the Windows boot configuration database (BCD), we’ve always had BCDEDIT.EXE, which is a reasonable tool to use but not a lot of fun to automate, e.g. finding and removing a […]
Fixing PowerShell on Windows PE for ARM64
In past blog posts, I noted that the ADK for Windows 10 started adding ARM64 builds of Windows PE, but they were missing some key things: no HTA support, and busted .NET […]
The overhead of Edge on Windows 11 (and 10)
I noticed while looking at the WebView2 processes on Windows 11 that there was also a set of Edge processes running from the moment I logged in: I understand why that happens […]
The overhead of Widgets and Teams in Windows 11
When you sign into an unmodified Windows 11 installation, you may notice the side-by-side icons for the Chat app (basically an entry point for the consumer version of Teams — the one […]
Geeking Out: Network booting
When we started working on Tanium Provision, one of the things we needed to build was a mechanism to do network booting. It’s fine to boot from a USB key (and necessary […]
Windows 11: When 4GB is not 4GB
Funny story: I was trying to test out some Windows 11 upgrade scenarios and had configured a VM with 4GB of RAM since that’s the minimum required to support Windows 11. With […]
Upgrading to Windows 11 with Tanium
I’ve always known that Tanium supported doing in-place upgrades to later versions of Windows, but since I had been focused primarily on Tanium provision for bare metal imaging, I had never actually […]
Introducing Tanium Provision
Most people remember that I left Microsoft and joined Tanium a while back. One of the things I’ve been working on at Tanium was publicly announced this week, with a Go-Tanium YouTube […]
You can bypass the Windows 11 hardware requirement check, but it’s not a good idea
2022-07-25: See https://oofhours.com/2022/07/25/bypassing-windows-11-hardware-requirements-revisited/ for more up to date information. 2021-01-25: Edited to reflect that settings that worked on Insider Preview builds no longer work with the released Windows 11 RTM builds. Microsoft […]
What’s new in Windows 11, part 2
Part 1 was rather lengthy, covering the UI changes in Windows 11. We’ll start off part 2 by looking at the changes to the Windows apps. Yes, these are also UI changes. […]
Out of Office Hours 
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