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 […]
SKUs, Glorious (Windows) SKUs: part 1
Michael Niehaus
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
“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 […]
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 […]
Running x64 on Windows 10 ARM64: How the heck does that work?
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 […]
Product Review + Windows 10 ARM64 discussion: Samsung Galaxy Book S
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, […]
Turn off the (Insider) News & Interests page
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 […]
Turn off the “Meet now” button
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 […]
Turn off the (new) Edge welcome page
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 […]
Tanium 101
It’s now been over three months since I left Microsoft and joined Tanium as a Global Technology Specialist. During that time, I’ve been through a lot of training, as well as hands-on […]
Digging into the Windows Feature Experience Pack
If you’ve not heard of the Windows Feature Experience Pack, here’s some catch-up reading for you: Releasing Windows Feature Experience Pack 120.2212.2020.0 to the Beta Channel Microsoft is testing out this new […]
UEFI Secure Boot: Yes, again
Last week, I posted about UEFI Secure Boot, showing how to look at the Secure Boot “db” on a UEFI device. To summarize, the certificates in the UEFI “db” variable are used […]
Scripting languages on Windows: a broader view
If you spent your career in a Windows- and Microsoft-focused bubble, you probably worked with scripting languages like those I mentioned in my previous blog post. But those that worked in cross-platform […]
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